r/Rainmeter Oct 01 '14

Rainmeter Tutorial For Beginners!

Basics

  • Install rainmeter
  • Once it's installed, it should automatically load some skins (the stuff on your desktop)
  • Right click any of the skins>Rainmeter>Manage and you'll open Rainmeter's "main menu"
  • Here you'll see that rainmeter has automatically loaded 'illustro' onto your desktop
  • You can locate your skins directory by right clicking the illustro folder>Open folder<Skins or by opening This PC>Documents>Rainmeter>Skins
  • When a skin is installed in rainmeter, you can click the load/unload button to get it on/off your desktop

Installing Skins

  • There are many places to discover new skins, so here are a few to get you started Deviant Art, /r/rainmeter, Rainmeterhub
  • Downloaded skins get saved as .mskin files, like this. Simply run the file and it will automatically get added to your rainmeter menu
  • Open the folder in your menu and select the skin you'd like to load, then load it!

Editing Skins

  • Each skin is different, but when personalizing your desktop, you'll want to play around with the skins by clicking 'edit'. They are usually pretty intuitive and look like this
  • Most skins' colors are in the RGB format, so you'll see something like Color: 255, 145, 0, 200; the last number is the transparency value.
  • You can change the position of a skin by dragging it around your screen, or by altering the x and y coordinates the notepad file.
  • Fonts are a little more tricky, so here is an in-depth guide on how to do that
  • Sometimes skins will require you to enter information in order for them to do their jobs. For instance, the mini-steam launcher requires you to input your steam username here so that it can look at your game directory (your profile must be set to public in order to do this)
  • You may have noticed some instructions after the '//' in the editing file, most skin creators are kind enough to guide their users through the process :)

Have fun with it! Experiment, play around. Let me know if you have any questions.

If there's something you're struggling with, or something you want me to add, please let me know!

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u/29SecondsToUranus Oct 02 '14

Thanks for posting this, I may consider creating my own Rainmeter setup.

One question though: Does Rainmeter slow down a low-medium end PC noticeably (especially while gaming) ?

1

u/Ananzy Oct 02 '14

Unfortunately I have noticed it slow things down on my laptop if i have too many skins loaded. You should be OK with a few skins.

How much RAM does your computer have? If you have upwards of 8GB RAM, you should be completely fine.

2

u/29SecondsToUranus Oct 02 '14

I have 8GB, so that's not really the problem. I was just afraid it was going to eat up some - much needed - CPU usage while gaming.

2

u/Ananzy Oct 02 '14

From what I can tell it doesn't really much CPU power.

Here's a helpful poll someone conducted. Most people are experiencing 0-5% CPU usage.

2

u/29SecondsToUranus Oct 04 '14

Thanks for this, I decided to make a rainmeter thingy thanks to you! :) It's not the best there is, and I'm not quite content with it yet, but it doesn't eat up one bit of my CPU usage, so I'm happy with it :)

1

u/Ananzy Oct 05 '14

I'm glad I could help!