Monday, October 13, 2008

Desktop Customization

I have read a lot of Desktop Customization guides for windows, they seem to be popping up all over the place, so I thought that it would be a good idea to create one of my own using what I think are the best bits from others, as well as a bit of my own stuff. So, this is my desktop:

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The dock at the bottom is ObjectDock(the free version is good for this customization) with live previews enabled and no icons or docklets, this dock shows live previews of all open windows. If there are too many to fit horizontally, the vertical dimension will scale down. The previews also have a maximum height. The top bar is a customized rainmeter(make sure you get rainmeter, not rainlendar). To customize rainmeter use the Simplicity skin along with the Hud.Vision skin. Unzip the skins into the skins directory in the rainmeter folder under Program Files. Some screens up close of the top bar:

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From left to right, Clock, CPU monitor, RAM monitor, Pagefile monitor, HD monitors, network monitor.

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From left to right, CPU graph, Network download graph, Network upload graph. Also, the screenshot is not that great, a bit of the network graphs are cut off.

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Finally, the calendar highlights the current day(note I am writing this in advance so the day may not be accurate).

I have modified some of the configuration files in HUD.Vision to fit with the theme of Simplicity, the modified files are available here, just unzip each skin file into the HUD.Vision file under the skins folder, overwriting the files that are already there. Credit goes to Lifehacker for the dock idea.

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