Rainmeter is a program that you can setup with skins to display various information. For example you can have it display a clock, cpu load, mem usage, hard drive space, RSS feeds, IP addy, up and down speeds, etc. The whole skinning process is also the way you add in the way you want to see the data. So it's up to the skinner to setup that information to be shown. Along with being able to use images with transparancy, animated images, and buttons it is all setup through a single ini file that it isn't very hard to get started skinning.

Due to Rainy not supporting Rainmeter anymore and concentrating on his other work it appears as the original rainmeter page is down so I'll list some alternate download spots.
MajorGeeks mirror
SnapFiles mirror
Freewarefiles mirror

Also if you don't have winxp you'll need to get the gdiplus file. You only need to drop the dll file in the rainmeter directory. I believe you can also have it in the OS dir but I'm not certain. I keep mine in the rainmeter DIR personally. Majorgeeks has a link to some windows link that will lead you to a exe where you have to go through windows validation thing. You should be able to use www.google.com to find just the gdiplus.dll I don't want to give links to that file at another other places cause I don't want to be held responsible if you get a bad file. Also I do not know about the quality of the places I mirrored above. I've only gotten a couple of things off MajorGeeks and had no troubles. I was just listing a few places that I've seen rainmeter hosted at. You download at your own risk as should always be the case. Good Luck

Tutorials by Amfest

Amfest