Support Windows Gadgets Not Working

46.3 of 232 might as well be junked up. Sure it sounds like a lot of space but you have over three quarters in use. Couple that with your RAM size and you might as well be trying to fit an anvil into a pizza box. It's different if you have the RAM/processor to deal with the clutter. I have a terabyte in my desktop and use maybe 100Gigs (not including system required storage). My laptops pushing 50Gigs (not including system required storage) on a 500 but that's because I haven't gotten around to cleaning out my files and moving what I want to keep onto my portable.

If I were you I'd get some sort of portable -be it a hard drive, flash drive, or other- and backup my files to it. I'd also do a clean install of Win7. Trust me, it might take some time doing the install -with the updates and whatnot- but it's well worth the wait to be running on a cleanPC -no reference intended, maybe- as opposed to a cluttered one.

-Shiranui

 

I'm pretty sure the Windows 7 disc I have is just an upgrade, which I used to upgrade from Windows XP on November 25, 2011, not an install. As for disc space, I had a red bar for a long time before I started putting videos I didn't need onto the HITACHI external hard drive I share with my mom, which has a total of about 1,000 GB of space and removing them from my computer. To give a rough estimate, I was always at about 15 GB.

So if I didn't have any problems then, and nothing's changed since then, it can't be from space issues. I think I'll try to contact Microsoft over the weekend. They'll most likely know.

 

Hard drive space really isn't an indicator of computer performance or issues, unless your hard drive is near full. If you have weird quirks about your computer, it's possible that the registry is messed up. Nights is correct that the easiest way to clean up your registry is to do a fresh install of Windows, but programs like CCleaner can also help.

However, it seems your issues are fairly minor. You should post on Microsoft support boards. They're more likely to know what's going on and to be able to help you.

 

What is the link to CCleaner, and how does cleaning your registry resolve a small issue like this?

Alternatively, I may just deal with it since, you're right, it's only a minor annoyance. I just restarted my computer twice, and it came up the second time. While inconvenient, the only way to fix this is to keep restarting my computer when this happens until the Windows gadgets load.

There are only two things I don't understand:

1. When this happens, I also run into issues with Windows Movie Maker (see my Windows Movie Maker Issues thread in this forum), so the two are connected, but how is that possible when Windows gadgets and Windows Movie Maker are two completely separate and individual programs?
2. The only culprit I can think of that's causing this is one of Microsoft's updates around the date I made this thread, which is exactly when this problem started. However, my mom's computer is also Windows, so when I get updates, she gets updates and vice-versa, and yet, her computer doesn't have this problem. It got it once, which I mentioned previously in this thread, but not since, whereas I get it frequently.

As for contacting Microsoft, the only contact options I can see are live chat or call, and I'd rather not do either of those because I'm not good at them and always feel pressured, especially with live chat where I feel that I may take too long to write out my problem and they may disconnect me. (In fact, when I was on live chat with Amazon one day for an issue, I had a support representative ask me if I was there.) Do they not have a simple e-mail form?

 

Just wanted to update this and say that the gadgets have been loading, and I think recent Windows updates is what might have fixed issue -- latest updates were installed on February 13 -- but I'm not entirely sure, as I had to restart my computer this morning once to get the gadgets to load. However, before I restarted my computer, I opened the task manager, and under processes I noticed sidebar.exe was running, which is for the gadgets, if I've got my information right, so I might have just not waited long enough for the gadgets to load.

In any case, this can be locked now. If the issue returns, I'll just restart my computer until the gadgets load.