Portable Rainmeter

This is the portable edition of Rainmeter - a comprehensive desktop customization utility that supports multiple skins and gadgets. Among other features, it shows users resource usage details.

Since installation is not a prerequisite, you can save the program files to any location on the hard disk and click the executable to run.

It is also possible to move Portable Rainmeter to a USB flash disk or similar storage unit, in order to run it on any computer with minimum effort.

What's more, the Windows registry section does not get new entries, while a standard file deletion is enough to remove the utility.

At initialization, Portable Rainmeter creates an icon in the system tray area, that you can double-click to set up configuration parameters. The tool includes six built-in gadgets: clock, disk meter (measuring one or two disks), Google search engine, network traffic (upload and download speed, IP address), recycle bin, resources usage (CPU, RAM, Swap), along with an additional “Welcome” gadget showing Rainmeter documentation.

In general, gadgets built for this platform come with multiple variants, but the default Illustro pack offers just one version for each item (aside from the disk meter).

You can place any of these gadgets on the desktop by double-clicking the corresponding INI file in the “Active Skins” menu. The utility lets you configure settings regarding frame position, coordinates, load order, transparency level, and action on mouse hover (e.g. hide, fade in), among others.

It is possible to save and restore Rainmeter's current layout, while excluding skin folders and files, and including the current wallpaper.

As far as general settings are concerned, the application offers multilingual support and automatically checks for updates. You can disable dragging, enable D2D rendering, reset statistics, and log all activity to file. These options may be also edited in the INI file.

Advanced users are given the opportunity to share skins they have created with other users, via the Rainmeter Skin Packager (.rmskin package). Aside from editing the name, author and version, you can add skins (from the Skins folder or custom), layouts and plugins (32-bit or 64-bit DLLs).

The program has a good response time and doesn't decrease system performance, using low CPU and memory. We have not experienced any difficulties throughout our evaluation, since Rainmeter did not hang or crash. Although its configuration panel is not particularly intuitive, users shouldn't take a lot of time to learn how to manage most parameters.

For enhanced functionality, you can team up the application with third-party plugins, such as IkonkoRainmeter or Integrator Theme for Rainmeter. Note that some external components require the installer version of Rainmeter (such as Vista Rainbar).