Very few people remember that Microsoft introduced something called the gadgets side-bar in Windows Vista. As with Windows Vista, everyone soon forgot the sidebar and gadgets that it came with. But the sidebar kept on being included in Windows 7 and 8/8.1 too. Unfortunately all these gadgets and sidebars have totally disappeared from Windows 10. Perhaps this is because of the fact that now Microsoft is targeting touch based devices and sidebar is more of an old generation desktop computer thing. Anyhow, if you want to have that sidebar magic back in your Windows 10 desktop PC, then you can use the W8 Sidebar.
W8 Sidebar a simple software that basically shows the sidebar on your desktop. It is not a portable program as it is designed using the Microsoft .NET framework. The sidebar shows some of the statistics about your computer like the current CPU usage, current disk consumption, the RAM usage, internet download and upload speed, your IP address, etc. It also has some tools like auto-shutdown which allows you to turn off your PC automatically at a certain time.
W8 Sidebar places an icon in the system tray of Windows desktop. If you right-click on the W8 Sidebar notification area icon, then you can launch even more tools that come with the software like Cleaner, Searcher, Network, Performance, System Info, and Reminder. Each of these tools open in a new window and can be separately configured to improve your system’s performance.
It is impressive to see that a single standalone program can both display the sidebar and comes with a range of tools. However, for some reason these tools seem to hang up the system once in a while which is not a very comforting thought especially when you are in the middle of some important work.
You can download the W8 Sidebar from https://sites.google.com/site/w8sidebar/.