Sidebar and Gadgets are one of Vista's new features. They're stored in your profile, though, so, if you regularly use multiple machines, it's difficult to keep them all in sync. Here's an article, though, from the Sidebar Blog that tells you how to use them from a USB key drive.
Tiger Direct has a Seagate 320GB SATA-300 hard drive for $100, $80 if you don't mind dealing with rebates. SATA-300 is one of several designations for the 3.0Gbit/sec spec for SATA drives -- fast, fast, fast! And the Seagate comes with a 5 year warranty, too.
The rebate's only good till 1/31. It looks like $100 is their regular price.
My Microsoft Action Pack for January arrived on Friday and with it came Windows Vista Business so the first thing I had to do was install it on one of the unused partitions on my main laptop's hard drive. I've been playing with it for about half a day, now, and have to admit, it's OK once I get beyond the flashy exerior.
I don't think I'm gonna rush right out and upgrade all of my systems -- matter of fact, I'm not gonna upgrade any of my systems yet -- but within a couple of months I'll probably upgrade most of them. It includes 10 licenses for Vista Business Upgrade which has apparently replaced the 10 licenses of XP Pro. I didn't see anything in the package that talked about the replacement/upgrade process, though. See, the Action Pack provides licenses that one can use internally to support their business. Unlike the MSDN subscription which provides software specifically for research and development purposes and prohibits its use in production, the software included with the Action Pack is intended to help Microsoft Partners use Microsoft's software to run their bueiness. So, if one has deployed all 10 of the provided licenses for XP Pro, must one immediately replace those installations with Vista Business? Since the Vista that's provided is an upgrade, can one upgrade the previously provided XP Pro? I'm sur ethis will all become clear to me onceI've made sense of all the material provided in this update, it just doesn't make a lot of sense right now.
Also in the package was and Office 2007 Enterprise and a few others including the new Office Accounting Professional 2007. I don't have a link for that particular product because the link on the Action Pack site points me to Small Business Accounting 2006. I imagine it'll be up soon, though.