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Wall outlet with built in USB charging

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Fastmac has created a wall outlet that include two USB ports for charging your peripherals without having to plug them into a computer.

USB Wall socketMy gal just showed me this and let’s just say it needs to be filed under: Why has nobody thought of this before? Typically, charging a device through your computer is considerably slower than doing it from a wall outlet (provided your device supports it). I know for a fact that my Samsung EPIC 4G will charge considerably faster when plugged into the wall than it will if charging off the USB port on one of my computers. The folks over at Fastmac have created an outlet replacement that includes 2 USB ports in a standard wall outlet; removing the need for that USB to outlet adapter.

I have an outlet in my kitchen that needs this in the worst way! Now when friends comes to visit and need a charge there’s no hunting for adapters, no need for them to plug into one of my computers, etc. All they’d need is a simple USB cord (which I have plenty of) and they could just set their device on the kitchen counter, plug in, and juice it up.

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Take note that the webpage says “This item is currently waiting on final safety approval.”

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Fastmac

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Manually restore Vista Sidebar to defaults

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I’m a customizer. I love Windowsblinds, I’ve used all kinds of sidebar applications like SysMetrix, Desktop Sidebar, etc. When I first heard about Vista including a side bar I was pretty excited… then I loaded some system monitoring gadgets and it all went downhill. Perhaps it’s the fault of the gadget creators themselves and not Vista Sidebar, but that thing ate up some serious resources. My laptop is getting older (Dell XPS Gen2, 2.0Ghz, 2g RAM) so for the longest time I didn’t bother running the sidebar. After some discussions with a co-worker I decided to play with it again and loaded it up with some gadgets. Suddenly, it wouldn’t load or it would load but there would be no gadgets and Task Manager would report it continually gobbling up memory. I have no idea if it was a specific gadget that caused the problem I just knew I wanted it fixed.

The Sidebar Properties window has an option to restore the default Vista gadgets, but it was greyed out. No love there.

Vista Sidebar Properties - restore defaults greyed out

Unable to use the default method for restoring the defaults I set out to try and fix it manually. Here’s the steps I took:

  1. Open task manager and kill any sidebar.exe process that might be running.
  2. Open Explorer and browse to C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar (where <user name> is the user you log into Vista with).
  3. Open Settings.ini, hit CTRL-A (select all) and hit delete. The file is now empty. Save the file.
  4. Browse into the Gadgets directory.
  5. Select CTRL-A (select all) and delete them. (Note: I couldn’t delete ALL of the gadgets the first try. If that happens reboot and try to delete them again… after the reboot you should be able to delete them all).
  6. Restart Windows Sidebar.

Everything should load successfully now. You should see the default Sidebar with the clock, wallpaper thingy, and RSS feed. For some odd reason the “restore defaults” button is still greyed out… go figure.

Now that it’s back will I give Sidebar another shot? Probably. I love to tweak my system and I can think of a few gadgets I’d love to have always on access to… I’ll probably still shy away from the resource meters as I suspect they were causing the excess cpu cycles.

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