Microsoft is playing with the desktop again -- and this time, I hope they have it right.

In previous versions of Windows, the company has tried to make the desktop useful for more than photos of our families or breathtaking scenes -- but it has never made a case that is compelling to most of us to do much more, unless placing dozens of shortcut icons on our desktop qualifies as doing much more. I don't think so.

		David Radin is a free-lance writer and business consultant who helps his clients get more from Windows and other business applications. You can contact him at www.megabyteminute.com.

Remember Active Desktop? Of course you don't. Most people have no idea what Active Desktop is. They never used it, even though it was standard in Windows 95 and 98. The idea was to create a desktop that could call real time information from the Internet.

It looked like wallpaper, but was much smarter. In the thousands of desktops that I have seen over the years, I can't remember more than a handful that took advantage of Active Desktop. But I can remember the many times that an error would occur, replacing the desktop scene with a message that the user needs to reload Active Desktop. Thank goodness, that ended with Windows XP, a very stable version of Windows that is now Microsoft's flagship product.

When Windows Vista ships, though, we'll have another attempt at smart desktops. This time they call them gadgets, and those that are on my Windows Vista test system work very well. A gadget is a cool icon that calls on information in a smart way. It's not a new idea. Macs have a similar concept -- and so does Google desktop. But this time, it looks like Microsoft is putting out a competitive version.

In Windows Vista, they become part of a new area on the desktop called the sidebar. Think of it like you would Google Desktop, but with better transparency and graphics.

My clock gadget looks like the traditional Simplex clock that adorned the walls of my elementary school classroom decades ago. With a little tinkering, I can add or remove the second hand, change the look to a different face or undock the clock from my sidebar. It makes looking at the clock more fun.

My pre-release version of Vista also came with a gadget to get news feeds -- using a technology called RSS -- and a slide show that gets vivid photos in real time from the Internet. So far, none of these gadgets has caused me any turmoil.

The power of gadgets is more than grabbing a couple of nice-looking, smart icons from Microsoft. The power is that external companies and developers can create their own gadgets and make them available to the public -- or to only their own employees. A gadget that features a weather map for cities showing your company's facilities quickly comes to mind or one that grabs data from your company's manufacturing database so you can track when your customer is likely to be shipped the product he ordered from you.

The combination of real-time data access over the Internet, high resolution graphics and availability right on your desktop makes this a powerful concept. For some companies, it might help justify upgrades to the new operating system. But of course, that depends on the return on the investment in creating the gadgets.

I guess that's limited by only the ability of your employees to create the killer gadget.