Yahoo widgets is a nice little piece of freeware that will, if properly used, help you in making your XP look like Vista or Mac Os X, but even if you aren’t trying to fool your friends or yourself, it can change your desktop into something a lot more useful. From games to weather forecasts, there are literally thousands of free widgets available at the Widget Gallery.

Installing them is dead easy – you can do it from your browser. (You will need to have the main widget-handling software installed before, though.)

Here are my favorite widgets:

1. iTunes Remote Control

This iPhone-shaped cool little widget lets you control iTunes from your desktop, or if specified,

from on top of all other windows. With its fabulous design and user-friendliness, it is my certain favorite. You have full control over your iTunes – you can add songs, edit info and much more. And yes, you can even watch movies from it. What a nice thing to decorate your desktop with.. Download it here.

2. Yahoo! Weather

This is also one of my favorites. The design is again, simply marvelous.

It lets you choose your location from pretty much all the world’s cities, the 5 day forecast from weather.com is updated automatically. You can view both the forecast and detailed current weather conditions: wind speed, humidity, sunrise and sunset and pressure. And of course, you can view temperature in both ‘C and ‘F. You can download it here.

3. Calendar

Name says it all. I prefer Rainlendar, but as I’m reviewing Yahoo widgets and Rainlendar is a seperate program, this will have to do.

The Calendar widget has a clean, customizable look that will suit any desktop – it’s a little dull, though. The current date is highlighted (you can choose the color). When a date is clicked, another widget, the Day Planner launches and you can schedule events for any specific date. It’s a good filler for your Vista’ish sidebar. Download it here.

4. Digital Clock

Another well-designed, funky, glass widget, this one displaying the time and day. It lets you set several alarms that will alert you with a tone and a custom, semi-transparent message on your screen. It is also possible to assign a chime every hour or half. Available for download here.

5. Picture Frame

A great widget to decorate your desktop with! Lets you add photos from flickr and Yahoo! Photos and change them every once in a while. You can also upload photos with it and even edit your uploaded images! What a clever little frame… Download here.

There are thousands and thousands of other widgets, see which you like and make a suggestion in the comments!