If you are a new user to Microsoft Vista or just have not noticed yet, there is a space to the right of your desktop for some gadgets.

Microsoft Gadgets are light-weight single-purpose applications that can sit on the user’s computer desktop, or are hosted on a web page. According to Microsoft, it will be possible for the different types of gadgets to run on different environments without modification, but this is currently not the case.

According to Microsoft there are three types of gadgets;

1. Web gadgets - run on a web site, such as Live.com or Spaces.Live.com
2. Sidebar gadgets - run on the desktop or be docked onto, run on the Windows Sidebar.
3. SideShow gadgets - run on auxiliary external displays, such as on the outside of a laptop or even on an LCD panel in a keyboard, and potentially mobile phones and other devices.

I have to say the gadgets are a interesting and useful addition to Vista over XP. Currently I have running a few gadgets (in fact my sidebar is full), they are the weather, the clock, notepad, feeds reader and a media player.

All these gadgets apart from the media player come standard with your version of Vista, you have to go to the downloads area of Microsoft to get any additional gadget. I advise you read the reviews before downloading any new gadget, there are a lot of quality ones out there but also some dodgy ones.

So far no serious errors or faults have been recorded in the gadgets (not sure about the downloadable ones).