How to Change “Get More Gadgets Online” Link in Windows Vista and 7 Sidebar Gadget Gallery Window?

When you open Desktop Gadget Gallery window in Windows Vista or 7, you get a link “Get more gadgets online” in the bottom right corner of the window:

Windows_Sidebar_Gadgets_Gallery.png

When you click on it, it opens the default Microsoft gadget webpage in your browser.

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Using this tutorial, you can customize this link and can change it to any of your favorite website. You can change the link to another 3rd party gadgets download website. Or you can change it to your organization website or completely disable it if you don’t want your employees to download gadgets from Internet.

So without wasting any time, lets start the tutorial:

1. Type regedit in RUN or start menu search box and press Enter. It’ll open Registry Editor.

2. Now go to following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies

3. Under Policies key, look for a key named Windows. If you don’t find it, create a new key with the name Windows.

4. Create another new key Sidebar under Windows key.

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So the final registry key path would be:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Windows\Sidebar

5. Now in right-side pane, create a new String value OverrideMoreGadgetsLink and set its value to your desired URL.

For example, you can set it to https://www.askvg.com/ to open AskVG website. Or you can set it to any of your favorite website URL. If you want to disable the link, you can set it to localhost or a simple dot (.) or change it to a slash, etc.

Override_More_Gadgets_Link.png

6. That’s it. Now whenever you click on the link, it’ll open your favorite website in browser.

NOTE: If you want to restore default link, simply delete the String created in Step 5.

PS: If you want a ready-made registry script to do the task automatically, download following ZIP file, extract it and run the extracted REG file. It’ll ask for confirmation, accept it:

Download Link

The above REG file will change the URL to AskVG.com homepage. To change the URL in REG file, right-click on the file and select Edit option. It’ll open the file in Notepad. Now you can customize the URL.

Published in: Windows 7, Windows Vista

About the author: Vishal Gupta (also known as VG) has been awarded with Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award. He holds Masters degree in Computer Applications (MCA). He has written several tech articles for popular newspapers and magazines and has also appeared in tech shows on various TV channels.

Comments

NOTE: Older comments have been removed to reduce database overhead.

  1. but how do we change the text? The “Get more Gadgets online” ?? Can we change it too? it’s weird if the link is twitter then the text is get more gadgets online. lol.

  2. ^^ I’ll have to look into various system files using Resource Hacker to find the dialog box location. If I find it, I’ll post it.

    @aaron and Leomate
    I spend lots of my time in digging into Windows Registry and system files and luckily I find such kind of things. 🙂

  3. We will see this trick posted on other tech websites later. VG, you always come up with them first.

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