You can also use skins to serve as a panel containing shortcuts to all your favourite programs, allowing you to banish the taskbar or clean up the desktop. They can also be developed further to provide interactive functionality, such as skins that record notes or let you tweet direct from your desktop. These skins can act as simple information portals – giving you access to system information, favoured RSS feeds or the latest email count in your inbox, for example.

It offers an alternative platform to the Sidebar used in later versions of Windows, offering a wide variety of customisable “skins” (Rainmeter’s rather confusing term for gadgets) that allow you to pretty much cover the desktop with your choice of information, tools and shortcuts. This is where Rainmeter comes in: this desktop customisation tool works on the assumption that the desktop is yours to do with as you see fit. One way in which your desktop can be made to work harder is by using it to display all kinds of useful information – in Windows 7, there are specific gadgets that perform this function, but they’re limited and a little clunky to implement, while XP users are left completely in the cold.

For most people, the options provided by Windows itself are often sufficient, while others want to push the envelope further. Customising your Windows desktop can be as simple or as complicated as you like.

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