Rainmeter is a piece of software which allows for great customisation of your windows desktop. It runs in the background and allows you to choose exactly what components you would like to appear on your desktop. The components are similar to Windows Gadgets yet they are heavily customisable, and of course RainMeter is open source and therefor there's a hugely wide array of 'skins' to choose from.
Skins
Skins are the backbone of RainMeter. Once rainmeter is installed, you need to find a skin that you like and place it in the 'Skins' folder - within the installation folder of Rainmeter. Once the files are in the 'skins' folder, the skin is ready to display on your desktop.
Customisation
With your skin files in the correct folder, you can start customising your desktop. This is done by opening RainMeter - you will then notice the teardrop icon in your taskbar. This icon can be right clicked for a whole range of different options.
The option you are looking for to start using your skins is 'themes'.
Here you will see a list of all the skins in your skin folder. Clicking on a theme will turn it on or off. To further customise your desktop - you can turn certain modules of a theme on or off individually.
Using this method, you can have many modules from many different themes active on the desktop at one time.
