ALEX BLAKE

YOU’LL NEED THIS

RAINMETER www.rainmeter.net

WINDOWS 7 OR LATER

Preferably use Windows 10 as it’s still supported by Microsoft.

THE DEFAULT WINDOWS DESKTOP customization experience is fine, but not much more. You can change your wallpaper, adjust window accent colors, and switch up your lock screen—and that’s about it. If you want more power to change up your computer’s style, you will likely be disappointed with the results.

That all changes with Rainmeter. This lets you install various “skins” on Windows, all of which can add new flavors of visual flair to your desktop. These range from small widgets showing the time and weather to full-blown overhaul suites with moveable items, redesigned taskbars, and custom shortcut icons.

You can even build your own skins if you have a bit of coding knowledge. We will not cover that in detail today, but it is an area to explore further if it feels like your sort of thing. The good news for everyone else, though, is that Rainmeter requires no coding knowledge whatsoever, and you can easily customize most skins to your heart’s content with a few simple clicks.

1 GETTING STARTED WITH RAINMETER

Head towww.rainmeter.net and download the program’s installer, then follow the on-screen instructions to set it up on your computer. You can either choose the final release or the latest beta—betas are stable and have the latest bug fixes, but they may occasionally have features removed before they become finalized.