RainmeterFreeze

Rainmeter sure looks nice, and the variety of widgets that come with it can embellish and customize one's desktop to a very high degree. There's a reason for the "form over function" saying, and perhaps it can be applicable to Rainmeter, as there's a resource cost associated with customizing your desktop through its widgets.

If you want to customize your desktop with Rainmeter, but not lose out on the performance of your machine, RainmeterFreeze could prove useful in such a scenario: it's a lightweight tool designed to reduce the resource hit from using Rainmeter by suspending or lowering its priority in various cases.

RainmeterFreeze is an inconspicuous tool: plain and simple, you can access it from your tray, so whenever you want to make a change to the behavior of your widgets, right-click its icon and configure away.

As for the configuration options, users are free to choose the circumstances in which their widgets get frozen. You can elect to have the tool freeze then when you're not on your desktop, when the foreground window is maximized, or when in full-screen mode.

Users also have to choose between the two available modes: Suspend and Low Priority. The former suspends Rainmeter, reducing it to 0% CPU usage, while the latter simply instructs the CPU to give the process a lower priority. For clarity, the Suspend mode does not terminate the widgets on your desktop.

During testing, Rainmeter's resource usage was curtailed, and no glitching of any sort occurred. While focusing on a foreground window (a browser, for instance), the widgets were no longer updating. Upon minimizing the aforementioned window and focusing on the desktop, the widgets resumed their updating right away.

RainmeterFreezer delivers, and it's so simple to set up and get running that you could mistake it for a Rainmeter prerequisite.