Beautifying Your Desktop

Ever wonder how you can make your dull and unmotivated desktop into something like these?

Now you can!

First of all, you need program tools. So what you need?

http://www.ipi.fi/~rainy/legacy.html
Download Rainlender 2 and Rainmeter.

Rainlendar is a feature rich calendar application that is easy to use and doesn’t take much space on your desktop. The application is platform independent so you can run it on all major operating systems: Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Rainmeter is a customizable performance meter, which can display the CPU load, memory utilization, disk space, network traffic, time and many more things.

http://rocketdock.com/download

RocketDock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock.

Some may suggest ObjectDock but I prefer RocketDock for it’s stacking function (Addons). The file size is much smaller too.

http://rocketdock.com/addons/docklets/1791

This is the Addons I mentioned earlier. It stacks the icons together and very convenient too. Extract everything to the Docklets folder in RocketDock. You may need to restart RocketDock to let it work. Just right click the dock and select Add Items. It should be there.

For those who’re not going extreme makeover, You can install any Windows XP Desktop Skin Changer programs. WindowsBlind is pretty much user-friendly or you can use StyleXP too. Other desktop environment program are like BlackBox , GNOME , SDK etc are pretty tough.

For safety measures, don’t touch loading screen, startup and such. Changing desktop skin and screensaver is 100% fine. If you’re confident, you may change login screen too.

Default Rainlender and Rainmeter’s skin are boring. You need something better!

http://sk2b.hp.infoseek.co.jp/

This is the best place to get Rainlender / Rainmeter skin that is pretty anime-oriented.

http://customize.org/
http://www.wincustomize.com/

You can get various skins in these 2 sites too.

http://www.e-1day.jp/morning/manga/chi.html

If you like cats.. Pretty random though.

Enough for the programs, I’ll show you some of the Yakisoba member’s desktop and a few guidelines on how they did it.

Tsubaki used:

Weather. Moxa Weather for Rainmeter
Objectdock using Styrizo Reflection vol I to IV icons
HUD vision for Rainmeter.
Lucid for Rainlendar2.

Everything can be found Customize.org, for the dock icon go google it on deviantart.

Testarossa used:

Rainmeter – HUD vision, Simplicity
Rainlender – enecao
Rocketdocks
Stackdocklet + Custom icon

Other member’s desktop for more examples:

Lyre

Aelesia

Mine

You’ll notice most of them don’t have taskbar in their desktop and that’s because they hided it. To hide, right click your taskbar and select Properties. Tick the Auto-hide the Taskbar option and click Okay.

As for the missing icons, just right click the desktop > Arrange Icons By > Deselect Show Desktop Icons.