With the well developed Google Desktop Sidebar and the Vista Sidebar, putting all your gadgets and websites on a sidebar always visible might be quite tempting and can provide loads of information like email, RSS, weather, notes etc., but do you actually use these features? Does the usefulness outweigh the memory usage?
Update:Microsoft removed sidebar support from all of its recent Windows operating system versions.
It is interesting to note that the two products mentioned here have been retired. Google retired Google Desktop back in 2011 which meant the end for the company's sidebar widgets that you could run on your desktop.
Microsoft improved gadgets under Windows 7 which meant that you could place them freely on the desktop. The company then decided to shut down gadgets when Windows 8 came along, and while it is still possible to run them on Windows 8 or previous versions of Windows, support is dwindling.
If you like gadgets, then your next best bet is Rainmeter, a highly customizable desktop tool that supports quite a diverse selection of widgets that you can display on your desktop. End
Personally I like sidebars, but for some reason I don't use them. I have a pretty wide screen and a system which has plenty of memory to eat, but to me the cleaner my screen, the less stuff I have to focus on, the better.
I never really liked the Vista sidebar, it's just too "big", it looks a bit clunky sometimes, but there are some good widgets you can put in there, so it's not all bad.
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I pretty much like Google's sidebar, and it also has some good widgets, the best feature is probably the integrated hard drive and email search, which really can be a savior sometimes. It also seems that there are better widgets for the Google Sidebar, but that might be just my perception. In my case I don't really find the widgets so useful that I would need to see them permanently on a sidebar, what's your take on all this, do you perhaps use another sidebar?
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