Gadget Name:  Multi Meter (Dual Core) v.1.24

Description:  This gadget shows your current processor and RAM load on the machine and can be used to shortcut to the Task Manager in Vista.

Review:  It’s tiny, but it works really well.  It’s a real time display of the system resources, which is definitely useful to anyone using Vista, especially the people without $3,000.00 worth of hardware to run it (Which is most of us).  So, we can monitor out system, get to the task manager with a double-click, anything else?  Sure thing.  This gadget comes with a massive amount of customizable themes for the small version.  You can change the background as well as the bar colors of the meter.  The one downside to this is that when the gadget is undocked, the theme goes away, but otherwise, it’s very impressive for such a little thing.

Appearance: 4 / 5

Functionality: 5 / 5

Usefulness: 5 / 5

Overall:  4.6 / 5

Download @ Windows Live Gallery

Gadget Name:  Amazon Product Finder V1.00

Description:  Search Amazon and Other Popular Sites fast and easy. Get Full reviews, Photographs of items and descriptions in a nice easy to read layout. Order online. Find the best prices. shop online safely.

Review:  I can’t say I was particularly impressed when I tried this gadget out.  It offers a basic categorical search, but the kicker is that it doesn’t go to Amazon.com.  In fact, this gadget makes a search off third party website acting as a storefront for Amazon.com.  So essentially, it adds in a layer between the user and Amazon so that the site can tag products with the affiliate code.  Now, I have no problem with tagging with an affiliate code, my beef is how the site has been set up.  It comes off as an online storefront, though all it does is pull the amazon XML feed from the API to display search results.  This might be a little more useful if the website was designed a little better or looked a bit more professional.  Though given the purpose of this gadget, I would almost just want to go straight to amazon.com’s search page as it effectively does the same thing And I’d already be there ready to buy stuff.  The other problem with this gadget is the link on the bottom that seemingly goes somewhere, though I haven’t gotten the page to load yet.  But shouldn’t this link go to the XML display page instead of someplace different (the URL looks like it goes to a separate affiliate site).  Either way, while the effort is commendable, I feel this gadget could have gone a few steps further to make itself either more useful or more aesthetic, or perhaps, just better overall.

Appearance: 2 / 5

Functionality: 1.5 / 5

Usefulness: 1 / 5

Overall: 1.5 / 5

Download @ Windows Live Gallery

Gadget Name:  Slaine’s World of Warcraft Realm Status Gadget

Description:  This gadget will show the realm status of any particular server for the popular game World of Warcraft.  you can even click the flag button to open up Blizzard’s realm status page as per the country currently configured.

Review:  I like this gadget.  It’s small, does a decent job, and doesn’t attempt to take on anything too major for it’s purpose.  That being said, there is always room for improvement.  Since the main functions of the gadget are pretty solid, what I would love to see are additional options for people to say, display certain things in the big green orb like the realm population or queue number. I’m not sure if it’s possible, but I would also love to have a realm pull down list or maybe some other sort of lookup for the realms of a particular region.  The only reason being that some of those names are rather hard to spell out.  A couple of additional color skins would be a nifty feature as well.  But enough complaining, I will say that this gadget is probably one of the best looking Warcraft based gadgets on Live.com and it’s functionality is actualy useful for certain people playing on multiple realms or perhaps on a realm with an unstable populace.  Overall, this is a pretty sweet gadget. 

Appearance:  5 / 5

Functionality:  4 / 5

Usefulness:  4 / 5

Overall:  4.5 / 5

Download @ Windows Live Gallery