As promised, I’m back to discuss two other cool, free programs I discovered in my valiant quest to clean my desktop.

After installing Launchy and playing around with it a lot, I decided I wanted to work on a little beautification and add some pizzazz to the desktop.  I went with another free option: Rainmeter.  Rainmeter allows you to create these widgets or gadgets or whatever you want to call them that sit on your desktop.  These can measure your PC info (hard drive space, memory usage, power) or pull info from the internet (weather, news feeds).  They look pretty cool…at least I think so.  And it is handy to see a nice calendar, large clock, rss feed and so on right on your desktop.

Rainmeter is also very customizable, with tons of skins and plugins available.  For example, I downloaded a stock ticker plugin and it works great.  And I’ve tested out a bunch of different skins and found different elements that I liked.  Now my Rainmeter stuff is all situated nicely and fits well with my wallpaper, though I had to do some editing for that.

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