Rainmeter

While many of us are totally happy with the default look of the OS, others can’t imagine their desktops without customization. Rainmeter is an open-source Windows desktop customization program. The most popular one and certainly one of the best, Rainmeter enhances both the visual and functional parts of the user’s desktop by adding multiple meters and gauges and totally overhauling the appearance of the desktop with custom skins. The application includes dozens of pre-defined metrics for various system parameters, like CPU temperature, system performance, occupied and available memory, date and time, and other values.

Every skin of the program (and there are hundreds of them!) depicts those metrics in its own distinctive way, so you can easily switch between a nicely minimalistic style and a heavy steam-punk inspired desktop with gears and valves all over and still receive accurate and sharp information about what’s going on in the system.

Themes in Rainmeter are not hardcoded, so a user can adjust the elements with simple drag-n-drop movements. Advanced users, however, can find many more options to tune their desktops by editing text configuration files. This requires some coding skills and a lot of patience, unless you’re an IT geek. Rainmeter comes with several pre-configured skin suites and a lot more are available through community websites.

Friendly to the computer, Rainmeter uses very little CPU and memory resources and operates efficiently under any Windows OS from XP to 8. Despite being not so easy for newbie users, overall, Rainmeter is still an excellent free desktop enhancing tool. Give it a chance, and it will make your desktop look completely unique!