Solved use Rainmeter to get gadgets -- is this safe(r)?

[Judy in Texas]

Moving to Win7Pro I don't want to lose the Vista gadgets, yet I understand they are unsafe. Searching, I asked at the Rainmeter forum and this was recommended:

Vista Rainbar V4 by Gavatx on DeviantArt

At this point I don't want to plunge in to everything Rainmeter can do. I'll be occupied in transferring to the new machine. But I really want the slideshow, the graph CPU/Ram usage, and the clock-face CPU ram meter.

What is your advice? First, I don't have the computer just yet, and this skin is intended as a safer option for Vista, so I don't know if it will run in W&, but am willing to hope. Second, if you know of another way to accomplish my goal, I'd love to hear it.

Thank you so much!

Judy in Texas

 

[Jozsi]

I imagine this is likely safe just because it's open source and I personally like that they cloned the appearance of the original gadgets. However, it is not correct to say that gadgets are unsafe. Microsoft discontinued them because they realized that it's possible to make unsafe gadgets that will do malicious things. This is true of all software so if you only use the stock gadgets and some well known and trusted ones then you are perfectly safe.

Sidebar gadgets still work just fine and I've put 8GadgetPack on every installation of Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 because I refuse to let them go. It has dozens of safe gadgets included so you could download it, not to use its installer but just to extract those if the ones already in Windows 7 are not enough choice for you.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Yep many 7 users have used 8gadget pack it does have quite a few gadgets
8GadgetPack - Gadgets for Windows 10 / 8.1 / 8

I believe the win-7 security holes in regards to gadgets was fixed via updates that were disabled when ie11 first came out
No telling if the holes applied to Vista gadgets or not though ?

 

[Judy in Texas]

Thank you Jozsi and ThrashZone!

Just a tiny bit of added information, from my reading I understand that the security issue was the Vista Sidebar.exe file, not the gadgets originally included for that sidebar. I will start with either installing the Windows 7 sidebar (I have the new computer now and can probably find it somewhere) and will investigate 7sidebar and 8 gadgets.