Win7 gadgets no more? So then what?

Just started switching everything over to the new system over the weekend. berkeley I have a lot of stuff to move over...

One thing I see is I guess Windows 7 had "gadgets" for a short time, then Microsoft abandoned them to work on Win8 instead? Even the few that seem to come with the PC, I can only get the weather/date item to work.

I was using Yahoo Widgets on my XP for years. Even before Yahoo bought them, when they were Konfabulator Widgets. I really miss the weather.com radar map and separate 5 day forecast widgets plus the calendar. (I can't even get the stock calendar widget to stay on the screen).

Any suggestions? I was also using Rainmeter with a really big widget that had all the hard drives listed, CPU and load, network traffic up/down, etc. (I have two decent monitors so I have the real estate to run them.)

Just found this:

On March 2, 2012 it was announced that Yahoo would be closing down support for the Yahoo Widget Engine and closing the Yahoo Widget Gallery altogether. The announcement was made on the front page of the Yahoo gallery and on the Konfabulator forum.

Yahoo have made it clear that although support for the desktop widget engine has been withdrawn it does not mean that the Yahoo widget engine will suddenly stop working, in fact it should be fully functional for the foreseeable future (has been tested on XP, Vista, Windows 7 & 8).

Yahoo's reason for closure was twofold, the cost of replacing the older servers that supported the gallery and the refocussing of human resources on the development of the Yahoo! Connected TV widget platform."

So maybe I can just find the old program on my XP machine and fire it up again...

Windows 8 has live tiles that actively update weather, stocks, etc

Edit: nevermind...remembered you bought Win7. Stick with Rainmeter http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&q=rainmeter

They're generally not terribly useful. The clock and calender are nice of course.

The ones that I find somewhat useful is one that shows CPU and memory use as well as one that shows how full the HDs are.

I will have to look up the names when I get home.

In reply to aircooled:

Are you talking Rainmeter or Yahoo?

Those are Win 7 desktop gadgets. From what you are saying, maybe they are not available anymore?

In reply to aircooled:

I tried dragging the calendar widget onto the desktop and it keeps disappearing. (various other methods produced similar results). The clock went from a round clock to a black square with a dot when I moved it. Another one I tested did the same, and gave up on all but the "weather/temp with time" that was there when I fired it up...

It sounds like you have some other issues.

In case you do get it workingt he CPU / Memory gadget I was talking about is called: Sys Gadget. The drive space one is called: Imp's Drive Info.

wait.. you people actually want those annoying things on your desktop?

In reply to novaderrik:

Yup. I liked having the weather radar, forecast and a calendar on my 2nd monitor always at the ready.