Vista Sidebar...

Been using Vista Home Premium for a couple of months now. Basically, I'm happy with its new interface, security features, and of course, the Sidebar. Previuosly I was using Samsung SyncMaster 753DFX. Yup, it's a few years old 17" CRT. With the Vista Sidebar showing at the screen side , any program window won't be able to show in full if I'm to put it side by side with the Sidebar.

Vista will definately love the additional pixels of a widescreen (perhaps it's created with widescreen in mind), and I'm glad that I just purchased a unit, as mentioned in my previous post, a 22" LCD (BenQ FP222W). One of the reasons that I bought this monitor is because I want to display the Sidebar side by side with most of the programs, if not all, which I run frequently. I do access to my Gadgets a lot when I'm doing my daily job on PC.

I've read quite some posts on the Internet that some people will simply ignore it or even turn of the Sidebar, saying that those Gadgets will take up system memory and slow down system loading speed. However, with my entry-level E4300 C2D paired up with a pair of Kingston 512, my rig has no problem with my 8 Gadgets at all.

I have tested some of the well-known branded PCs which loaded with Vista Home at several local IT stores before. My conclusion, most of them are slow, even it's a C2D system. It's most likely due to too many "unwanted" or "unnecessary" pre-loaded programs running at the background. I was once testing a "h" brand notebook PC, I nearly falling asleep while waiting for it to boot up. It's no wonder why some people complain on Vista's performance. Is it the PC problem, or is it Vista fault? Perhaps they think that branded means first-class. Anyway, Sidebar now display itself perfectly on the right side of my screen...but? Yeah! Can we widen the Sidebar? Or perhaps make it double-column or even triple-column? How about changing those Gadgets size? Unfortunately, no, at least not in the mean time...