Another Rainmeter Skin

Here is another Rainmeter skin I made. I can't take credit for the icons or the carbon fiber texture pattern though, they are by various artist who's names I can't recall off the top of my head. They can be found at http://www.deviantart.com/

All in all I think I like this one better than the last one I made. The meters are more concise and the icons are links. The Intel logo opens the control panel, the memory logo opens the task manager, the drive logos open the corresponding drives and the feed head lines of course open the corresponding feeds.

Rainmeter Skin

I know I'm behind the curve when it comes to desktop eye candy. I've never really had much use for it in the past so I never kept up on desktop widgets-gadget-doohickeys. But when I fired up my Vista Laptop for the first time I couldn't help but noticed the Windows sidebar gadgets and after checking the task manager how much resources they use. I promptly disabled them. For me when it comes to computers function comes before form.

Fast forward a couple months and I still hadn't given the subject much thought until I was browsing www.deviantart.com looking for cool desktop backgrounds and I stumbled upon Rainmeter a very light and skinable alternative to Windows, Yahoo, and Google desktop candy that has been out since at least 06. On the Left is a bank of skins I made wednesday night, which includes a date and time display a CPU and RAM monitor a Hard Drive monitor a slide show and a RSS feeder.(the iTunes now playing display is a skin I made for CD Art Display, another really cool and skinable little program that works with iTunes, Winamp and Foobar) All up they use less than 5MB of RAM compare that to windows gadgets with similar functionality that eat up around 30MB of RAM and Rainmeter is a winner to me.

There are a couple draw backs to using Rainmeter though the first of which since it's free and no longer in development there is not really any help to speak of, your pretty much on your own. And the second is that although you can find a lot of different skins online that are pretty cool, if you want to make one on your own, again since there isn't much help you'll pretty much have to figure it out.(I managed to so it can't be that hard right?) A skin for the most part is just a background image and a .ini file that tells Rainmeter what and where to display. A good starting point is to download a skin that has the functionality you want and play with the code and see what it does, that's what I did. The code is pretty simple once you catch on. The only real problems I had was figuring out the RSS feeder.

If you are even slightly computer savvy and have a little artist flare Rainmeter might be some thing you could have fun with.

My windows 7 Experience

If you were anything like me then the change from XP to Vista was not a pleasant one. I went from a 5 year old $300 Walmart Compaq desktop with 2ghz AMD single core and a gig of RAM running XP very well to a brand new Dell laptop with a 2.16ghz dual core Intel Core 2 Duo and 3 gigs of RAM running Vista Home Basic. The Dell on paper in twice the computer as the Compaq, but I sure didn't notice twice the performance. In short Vista out of the box in a dog. A great example is all the background services it runs that are totally useless to me, and I would wager most other people to. Add to that the privilege issues and utterly self defeating UAC(Chicken Little) notifications and you get a big fat F in my book. So I spent many sleepless nights searching the web for ways to squeeze every last bit of speed out of Vista, and learning a lot about computers along the way. I guess I should thank Windows for putting out such a crappy OS it taught me a lot that has thus far transfered over to to dealing with 7.

So when the windows 7 Beta came up for download I thought what the heck it can't get any worse than Vista right? And to my surprise I really like 7, aside from a slightly glichy UI(it is a beta after all) and a couple minor issues(which I'll detail below) it runs great. For a beta it feels surprisingly complete. My only real complaint is the taskbar. I like the new look, but what I don't like is that by default if you pin shorts of your various music, picture and what not folders to taskbar they get ganged into a jump list. If I wanted to have to go through a list to get to my folders from the taskbar I would just use the start menu. To enable direct folder links in the taskbar you have to enable the hidden quick launch toolbar. Which once you figure out how to do that isn't a big deal really but there should an option to direct link folders or gang them in a jumplist in my opinion.

Issues.
Here is my current setup.

Dell Inspiron 1525 Laptop.
2.16ghz dual core Intel Core 2 Duo
3 Gig of RAM
Blu-Ray(read only)/CD/DVD burner drive
320 GB 5,400 RPM hard drive
1440x900 res screen

Prehensiles

22 inch LG LCD monitor
Logitech QuickCam Communicate MP Plus Webcam
Seagate 160 GB Free Agent Go external USB hard drive
Labtec wireless keyboard and mouse
Lexmark X4650 wireless printer/scanner
Klispch Pro Media 2.1 speakers

When I installed 7 it automatically installed the beta drivers for all of my integrated hardware, which was nice, I anticipated having to search the web for them. The only issue I had with that was the audio drivers. They seemed to work I guess, the computer made noise and played audio, but there was no setup interface for adjusting things like speaker configs or mic inputs and such. So I went to the dell site and downloaded the latest Vista drivers and they work just fine, problem solved.

As far as the prehersials that required drivers like my webcam, external HD and printer none of the drivers that came in the box worked. In all cases I had to download the latest drivers from the manufactures site, which is generally a good idea anyway beta or not so that wasn't a big deal. I did have slight problem with the webcam software hanging up but Windows fixed the issue on there end with in hours after I sent the error report via a windows update. It works fine now. The biggest problem I have had so far is with my Lexmark wireless printer. From what I understand by searching the web is that Lexmark had crappy drivers in the first place and half the time they still don't work on Vista, so I don't think it's a 7 issue as much as it is a Lexmark thing. The first time I installed the drivers it gave me a warning saying that my computer didn't meet the minimum system requirements which is common I've seen that many times from software because it doesn't recognize the OS. It has never been a problem in the past. The setup wizard did it's thing, and it said that it was installed but when I tested it out no go. So I uninstalled it and reinstalled in compatibility mode Vista still no go. The third time I installed it in compatability mode XP sp 2 and aside from a few bloatware options grayed out it went off with out a hitch.

About the Author

Well I suppose introductions are in order, you first...

If you just said hello or hi under your breath to your computer monitor you're a dork...

Anyway, chances are if you're reading this you probably already know who I am. But if for some random reason or another you stumbled across this blog and don't know me my name is Jason, I'm 29 years old 6ft tall with brown hair and blue eyes. I enjoy puppy dogs, candle lite dinners, long walks on the beach and DEATH METAL. My hobbies include listening to music, goofing off on my laptop and drinking beer, at the same time on occasion.(multitasking) That's about it, I'm not the most exciting person, pretty boring really.

illegiblelogo?

Why illegiblelogo as a title for a blog you may ask. Well it's a poke at the illegibility of Death and Black Metal logos. (If you were a fan you would get it) I got the idea from an ex-coworker years ago. He being not only a fan of Metal but a member of several local bands made the off hand comment one day that he was going to name his next band Illegible Logo. He of course never did so I stole it. It was either that or "Boring stuff about Jason you don't care about but are still reading because you're bored" And that's just too long.