answers.com widget ?¿ good bad indifferent?

[tinroots]

I just fell across answers.com the site, never been there before, they seem interesting... but not necessarily novel.

They have a widget - which would be fun to try, if it isn't a system killer, versiontracker doesn't seem to have it - as I was looking for a rating and reviews.

Any thoughts, any experiences?

I've been very slow, or cautious about loading widgets, as my system doesn't run so smoothly already - do widgets cause upsets or slow the cpu much?

appreciate your thoughts

 

[powermac]

Best to my knowledge, Widgets don't use much memory or CPU time. You can always, monitor what processors are running, and what resources they are using. All I can say is I have my PB as stock and run a few widgets, and have experienced no trouble.

 

[perfessor101]

I've been very slow, or cautious about loading widgets, as my system doesn't run so smoothly already - do widgets cause upsets or slow the cpu much?

Poorly written Widgets can eat CPU cycles and RAM faster that a Photoshop Gaussian blur as well as spew out GBs of scratch files in some cases.

Well written Widgets are an entirely different matter and will use only a modicum of CPU or memory and then only when they are actually running.

There is no way of knowing how well written a widget is without trying it out. There have also been some very ill behaved widgets that cleaned up their act in subsequent releases too. The Widget Manager preference pane makes controlling, installing, and uninstalling widgets simple and easy so it is easy to install one and if it misbehaves, dump it.