widgetBeat…

Yahoo!’s most popular 3rd party widget…

February 11th, 2008

by Al Merkrebs, February 11, 2008 @ 11:19 a.m. PST

Yahoo!’s desktop widgets are downloaded by the MILLIONS and MILLIONS.

So I got curious about what their most popular 3rd party widget might be. Turns out to be Sys Monitor by Andreas Kreisl, which as of today has been downloaded 547,085 times. (This puts Sys Monitor in 5th place overall, behind four Yahoo!-created widgets.)

The first thing you notice when you open Sys Monitor’s configuration panel is that it has TONs of configurable items, my favorites being a few LAN and WAN stats.

With any monitoring program, however, you have to live with the system resources that the program itself eats up. In the case of Sys Monitor, with all monitoring turned on, and on a Windows XP SP2 system, CPU usage bounced between 6% and 13%, and Memory usage sat at around 9 MB. Question is: do you get a good bang for your buck with this widget? Answer: No. You’ll have to ask the other half-million people what they think.

Pros: The moving gauges look important.
Cons: Big load on system resources; 100% opacity setting is more like 70%, making it hard to read against light backgrounds.
Coolness factor: 4/5 for newbies; 1/5 for cognoscenti.
Engine required: Yahoo! Widget Engine
Download widget here: Sys Monitor

Entry Filed under: widget reviews