Vista Sidebar Weather Gadget Service Not Available
Weather sidebar gadget is one of the built-in gadgets in Windows Vista that users can add to Vista Desktop Sidebar to display weather condition and temperature in degrees Fahrenheit or Celcius. In some cases, after adding Weather gadget to Sidebar, the gadget appears down and not working, and display may be showing the following error message: Service not available. When hover the mouse over the gadget, the tooltip will show Service not available in your language or region.
If user opens up configuration page and attempts to search for a location, even if the location is in US or North America, the search will return message “Service not available” too.
The issue may occured because of that your current location does not support the Web service that is used to retrieve weather data, or most likely, a bug in Vista or Weather Sidebar Gadget that cause Weather gadget do not work properly when the location, format and system locale is not set as standard settings, i.e. English (United States), although it’s not a requirement for system regional settings to be in English to run Weather gadget.
To solve the problem and make the Weather gadget working, Microsoft suggests the resolution to ensure that settings on the Formats tab matches the settings on the Location tab, by selecting the region of format in Formats tab that is corresponding to the current location in Location tab in Regional and Language Options dialog box. For example, English (United States) format should match with United States as location and so on.
If the service unavailable problem still unresolved after step above, try to change system locale for Vista to English (United States) too. Sometimes, simply by changing system language locale alone is enough to solve the Weather gadget issue. To change system locale, go to Control Panel -> Clock, Language and Region, and click on Regional and Language Options. Click on Administrative tab, then click on Change system locale button. Select English (United States) as the current language for non-Unicode programs. If you can’t set to English, try to select the same for regional language display format and system locale.
Note that changing system locale shouldn’t affect how Vista works, as the setting only applies on non-Unicode programs that may be using character sets non-native to or not supported by installed Vista system.
Once made the changes, refresh the Weather gadget by closing and re-adding the gadget to the sidebar.
For users who need to use non-English as system language or locale, there is a hack to make weather gadget works everywhere.
If nothing helps to make default Weather gadget working, try to download and install alternative weather and temperature gadget from Windows Live Gallery Vista Gadget section such as WeatherBug and AccuWeather.com Forecast Gadget.
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December 27th, 2008 18:20
I came upon this solution which worked fine with me:
For those who having problem in Weather Sidebar:
1) Close your sidebar
2) Go to “C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar”
3) Take Ownership for “wlsrvc.dll”**
4) rename “wlsrvc.dll” to “wlsrvc.dll.old”
5) replace the zip file i attached here and RUN sidebar.exe
ENJOY!
** How to take ownership:
1) right click “wlsrvc.dll” > Properties > Owner > Edit > SELECT “Administrators” > OK
2) Go to Permissions > Edit > SELECT Administrators > Edit > TICK ALLOW “Full Control ” > OK x 4
you can download the “wlsrvc.dll” zip from http://www.ziddu.com/download/3030005/wlsrvc.zip.html
December 3rd, 2008 06:22
It is indeed stupid that you need to change language for non-unicode software to get this garget to work. Considering: other unicode software including all other sidebar’s gadgets work perfectly with non-US locale setting; the weather gadget does not use non-english characters; locale settings is not a new Vista feature. The best solution should be: Do not use Vista. Go Linux!
December 3rd, 2008 00:49
Very useful, thanks a lot!
S.
November 2nd, 2008 07:47
Thanks a lot
September 2nd, 2008 02:01
Thank you!!! It worked
Keep it up …
August 9th, 2008 03:03
Thanks the info supplied worked for me.
July 28th, 2008 22:27
is there another solution? i dont want to change my non uni-code language option, i live in korea because i am teaching here, and some of my programs and games are in korean, if i change that setting the game will show all sorts of strange characters and question marks
am i doomed to never be able to have the weather gadget working?
February 6th, 2008 05:56
How could they possibly screw it up like that. Why do they get away with never fixing this stupid bug. Argh I so hate them… and yet I use Vista…
Thanks for the links to other weather gadgets!