Windows 7 Gadgets and Disabled UAC

For some reason Windows Gadgets don’t run in Windows 7 if you disable the UAC. Now I like windows gadgets and I am trailing Windows 7 but some of the software I was using was having a hard time with UAC so we turned it off and all of a sudden all my gadgets disappeared. after a bit of searching around I found the solution of the Windows 7 News blog.

<Quote>
The Windows 7 Sidebar and Gadgets do not work correctly if a user disables the User Account Control in Windows 7. There is however an easy way to make the gadgets and sidebar work again without having to replace system files (that was the way suggested in many forums).

All that needs to be done is to change one value of a parameter in the Windows 7 Registry to make the sidebar and gadgets work even with UAC disabled.

Open the Windows 7 Registry by pressing [Windows R], typing [regedit] and hitting [enter]. Now navigate to the Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Sidebar\Setting and change the value of AllowElevatedProcess to 1.

Restart the computer or logout and login again to see if the changes work as intended. The Registry setting ensures that the gadgets and the sidebar are working in Windows 7 properly even if UAC is disabled.
</Quote>

On my machine that registry value was missing so I added a new DWORD to the setting. Logged out and back in and all my gadgets reappeared. Life is good again :)

Vista Gadgets

I have been using Vista for almost a year now and one of the things I like in it is the Sidebar. When I was on XP I used desktop gadgets from a third party so when I finally got Vista I did some digging around its sidebar. While there are a number of cool gadgets two of the most useful I have found are the App Launcher and the Magic Folder.
App Launcher allows a user to set up shortcut's to what ever they like and they can be grouped into folders. While a number of standard windows folders can be accessed, for example My Computer, one of the things that is missing is links to the user folders such as Documents by default. 


















The other gadget I have found really useful is the Magic Folder. I often save all sorts of things to my desktop over the course of a day. Magic Folder allows me to drag and drop them onto the folder which then files them away based on the file extension. So any pictures are moved the the My Pictures folder, pdf's move to a folder inside My Documents, etc. You can specify your own file extensions and you can move to anywhere on your system.
If you find you regularly have masses of files on your desktop and you can store them loosely by file extension it is well worth looking into.