Okay so i have been using Vista (ultimate version) for a while now, and the gadgets are great and really handy, so i have complied what i think is the Top Ten Vista gadgets which everyone must have!

Okay the ten gadgets below are not in a particular order of top ten,  they are my favourite ten vista gadgets all are helpful in some way to me and makes it all a bit easier!

The UK Radio Player, is a great little gadget, you can add any online radio feed, and its just nice and easy to use, just have it in the corner and click play when ever i fancy some music. (and I’m not already blasting it that is!)

I came across this gadget the other day, and it is helpful to me, as i am a web host to keep tabs on my server, simple little gadget pings my server every few seconds to check its still online, so if it isn’t i can do something about it, only thing i can complain about is it only allows up to 5 servers, and the height is fixed, so when you have one server it still has a huge gap, and my gadget space is valuable to me!

The Top Process gadget is really handy, it shows the Top three CPU and RAM hogging programs, so i can easily see whats using what without having to open Task Manager, great easy gadget, could be improved if it had the ability to end task as well, but I am not sure how that feature could be added.

Volume control: I used to use another volume control gadget and when i re-installed the other day, i lost the gadget but when i went to re-download it from the Gadget Gallery instead i found this one which looks much nicer and has a few more features.

CPU Gadget, this definitely had to be the most “used” gadget, always handy to check how hard I’m working my system, helps me know when i need to easy off a bit to avoid problems.

RSS Feed Reader, Only recently have i started properly using this great little gadget, its one which comes default with Vista, and is nice and simple, you subscribe to a thread (through IE) and they show up, you can select to show 10-100 items, select a single feed of just one, handy tool to keep up to date with goings on, I started to use it to try and learn a bit more and be more in with whats going on with the Web, and also an attempt to get more ideas of things i can talk about both on my blog, and on my Radio show.

Notes, yes this is a simple little gadget comes with Vista by default like the CPU monitor and RSS feed reader, its a Handy note pad on your desktop to jot something down to remember later, i was (and admittedly still am) guilty of having a desk covered in little piles of yellow sticky pad notes, most of which are in unreadable handwriting or just end up lost and forgotten. So in that sense it is a handy little gadget, also means i don’t have quite so many random .txt files on my desktop with random things in. However a bad note (no pun intended… okay that’s a blatant lie.. anyway) is its quite a small area, and would be a very handy if you could extend the note pad so you don’t have to scroll down the note o read it all however i am not sure how easy this could be done on Vista Gadgets, it would be good though if it was possible.

 Weather Gadget, never bother to use it before the other day, but its pretty good does a variety of weathers, and it does my local area (Swindon) so I am happy.

Calendar again one of the pre-installed gadgets with Vista, but its something which i use daily, much easier to give it a glance and see today’s date etc in nice big letters, without having to faff about hovering over the clock like i used to especially when i am busy working on scripts or working with clients. 

Clock, okay this really doesn’t need a description of any kind, but i have to admit having a nice easy to ready clock on the right hand top corner of my first screen is a lot easier to read than a small time in the corner. So again it is a basic gadget which can really speed up little things you do when on the PC.

Okay that’s it that’s my Top Ten Vista Gadgets, all helpful all great.

Now when looking through the Vista Gadget Gallery I have seen literally thousands of gadgets which all have almost identical gadgets which do the same thing, and there are a lot of “Search” gadgets, like YouTube or Google and when i first got Vista i tried them and soon realised for me at least they were more annoying than there were useful, i almost always have a webpage open, and it is much easier to manually open the page than to use the often ugly gadgets which just waste my Desktop space.

 So here’s my first of what will hopefully be many Top Ten lists, hope you enjoy and find it useful.

Dan

Part 1:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=qI3-Gda4cdw

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Background:

I produce a local radio station show with some friends and we reviewed a film this is what i thought of it…

On Monday we saw ‘Meet The Spartans’ at Cineworld.

Synopsis from website:

After successfully skewering Hollywood’s scariest movie   (as two of the writers on “Scary Movie”), romantic comedy franchises (“Date Movie”), and Hollywood blockbusters (“Epic Movie”), writers/directors/producers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer now set their sights on “300.”

The heroic Leonidas, armed with nothing but leather underwear and a cape, leads a ragtag group of 13 – count ‘em, 13 – Spartans to defend their homeland against the invading Persians (whose ranks include Ghost Rider, Rocky Balboa, the Transformers, and a hunchbacked Paris Hilton).

The concert was AMAZING!

 Loved it!

I got a ticket signed by Chris and Jaret (bfs)

Chris signs his name backwards!

 we had to wait for 2 hours for bfs to come out i think my mate froze to death…

and also got another ticket signed from ppl from ZebraHead and Army of a freshman way cool show!

 Okay i left this post for quite a bit now so ill expland alot and try and talk about some of the crap i found funny.

 Was a truly amazing concert troughly loved it and cant wait to go to another.

 Anyway about 4 hours of contined jumping and singing, and everyone was so lucky it was load so they couldn hear me… i ended up right at the front moshing it near the speaker :D

during the end of bowling for soup and the end of it all i couldnt hack it, they ran out of water at the front and i was erm dying. so i had to go out to get a drink right in the middle of 1985 and missed all their last songs which usually are the best :(

so when i finnally managed to shove my way out i get there and about half of Zebrahead said hey… and i ignored them to get a drink. i was thristy!… and i said hi once i had downed to lrg coke cups :p

 amazing how sh*tty you feel when your dehydrated.

 what makes the above situation (of me ignoring zebrahead) worse is when we were quing out side one of The Bloodhound Gang was going round trying to sell their album, and i just thought he was a roadie @_@ oops… i only realised just before he got on stage. ace guy tho.

As i was hanging about NOT trying to stalk bfs… :p i saw something which just made me laugh.

there was the sterotypical obsessive middle aged fat bolding fan talking of the guy from zebrahead… but thats not all no this guy wasnt obsesive with ZEBRAHEAD NO he was talking about how much he loved Bowling For Soup! now is it just me who thinks, no matter how much you like the other bands which your touring with you still gonna find someone who is going on about another band a little annouying?!

what made me particularly laugh was they guy (form zebrahead) had one of those “will you just shut the F up and go away” faces every time he turned away from him.

hehe

so after standing out side the oasis, with most of bloodhound gang and army of a freshmen who were jsut standing arround having beers and smoking, until 1.30am (bearing in mind the concert finished at 11something with my mate tom who was so cold he was blue and shivering so feverishly he could barly hold the he camera phone ><

anyway i ment Chris and Jaret from bowling for soup, got photos as you can see above. and Tom kicked him self a day or so later when he suddenly thought wait a minute. why did i sit arround for 3 hours after with you and not get a photo of ME with them… silly boy tom… hehe

shame couldnt really wait arround for Gary and Erik but  i think if i had told would definatly not have been able to defrost, and my dad would have been a bit peved if he had to sit in the car for another 2hours…

also i have a hint, ALWAYS try to pay for £1 posters with a tenner! i went to buy a small poster and only had a tenner and because he couldnt find change he just said take it :p so i got a free poster yay to me! ><

 i can tell im rambling now.

I will have to have a go at posting my Mac computer review/rant soon.

Ok i warn readers now this will be slightly a rant, but hopefully will also act as a warning.

Firstly i would like to explain a bit about HTTPS and to try and clear up some misunderstandings a lot of people seem to have about it.

HTTPS:// which stands for Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol Secure, which is a secure connection between you and the server. HTTPS is NOT a protocol in it’s self. HTTPS is exactly the same as HTTP except it has a extra layer of “security” called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). When comparing HTTP and HTTPS the only “physical” difference is HTTPS uses a different TCP port (usually 443) where as HTTP uses 80 (or 8080 depending on server set up).

SSL was developed by Netscape for you guessed it sending files and information via the web (more…)

Okay, now a lot of people especially “enthusiasts” have warned me off of Vista, and i have had a few suggest the best thing i should do would be to delete Vista and go to Linux. While i am a “enthusiast” i still am (unfortunately) still clueless with Linux and am, okay i guess i can say it, I’m a Windows person!

I have upgraded from Windows XP Professional (SP2) to Vista Ultimate, and have to say i have yet to have any major problems what so ever, I was expecting to not like Vista, or at least find it so amazingly terrible to use i would think O’well its not worth it and continue with my XP Pro. But i didn’t, and now i have fully upgraded and no longer have any other Windows version installed.

Vista is a much smoother user expeience and has incorporated many features and software which usually would require seperate software, such as speach reconition. After trying out the speach reconition i had to decide it should be a area MS should improve on for Vienna…

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“The WOW starts here”

While windows Vista certainly brings in the eye-candy and a visual WOW, there is still much room for improvment.

Window Vista now has UAC (User Account Control) which is designed to increase security for users.

Vista’s UAC (as seen below) displays a option message when a program requires elevation, This in lamans terms means whenever a program needs Admin authority you get asked, even if you are already a administrator.

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