Rainmeter, Customize your Desktop.

If you spend much time at your computer, you probably occasionally wish there was a way to stick certain things on your desktop so you could keep an eye on them while you do something else. If you're like me, you've noticed that Microsoft desktop gadgets are invariably ugly, and are massive RAM whores, like everything else they've ever made. Gadgets are also violently limited by the fact that they suck worse than a 10 cent hooker.

So how can you fix this? Well, the good people over at www.rainmeter.net have a solution for you. It's a free desktop scripting program. It runs fairly lightly in the background, can come with tons of default themes, and can be modified heavily. Track anything from your system resource usage, to your Google Calendar, your webmail inbox. Have a clock, a regular calendar, notes, and an RSS reader and media player controller. All on your desktop. You can set it up so you can click through to your icons, you can make it hide on mouseover, you can arrange it all to your liking, and you can make your own skins if you can't find fifteen or twenty to do what you want.

It's not really all that complicated to use, whether you just want basic download plug and play stuff, or if you want to tinker. Plug and play is done with an installer, and it even has a self extractor that can work on skins and themes that are set up properly.

If you want to tinker, you open up your skins folder, make a new text document, save it as a .ini file, and edit away. There's tons of instructions available, and with all the skins already out there, there's tons of reference material available. Yesterday I modded a skin rather heavily to fit in with my new desktop background of a sexy EVGA motherboard. Today, I'm making a better CPU monitor for it.

With all my stuff running, with all the monitors that have to update quickly, my Rainmeter is only using 18MB of RAM. In this day and age, that's nothing. Literally. So get it, try it, and play with it. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it, but there's no excuse for not seeing what it can do for you.

Here  is a link to the skin I customized yesterday if you want to look. Try it, have fun with it. (Note, requires rainmeter to work. Otherwise it's just a bunch of plaintext files.)

Here  is a link to the self extracting Rainstaller file for the skin pack.

 This pretty picture displays it without needing rainmeter.