Smart Desktop

Smart Desktop is a resourceful and easy-to-use software application made to help you tweak the desktop by changing its appearance and enhance it with additional features. For example, you can monitor the CPU and RAM consumption, network upload and download rate, along with the occupied space in the disk drive. It's a lot like Rainmeter in some aspects.

Wrapped in a large and semi-transparent window that acts as a container for all widgets, Smart Desktop may seem overwhelming at first, but its elements are actually neatly organized. This large frame can be collapsed, which reduces visibility for some widgets.

You can view your computer's name and IP address, perform a Google search in a dialog box, find out how space is occupied on your local disk drives, check out the current time, CPU and RAM usage, download and upload rate along with battery life, access Recycle Bin, as well as control the active media player by pausing, resuming, stopping, playing the previous or next track.

Additional features are available in the expanded window of Smart Desktop. For example, you can search keywords on Dictionary.com and Wikipedia, consult a calendar, view the system uptime, write notes or create a to-do list, put together a photo slideshow, as well as quickly access Windows locations along with third-party apps via shortcuts (as long as they are installed). The tool can be asked to run automatically at every Windows startup until told otherwise.

We have not come across any difficulties in our testing, since Smart Desktop did not hang, crash or pop up error messages. It executes commands rapidly and leaves a small footprint on system resources, thanks to the fact that it uses low CPU and RAM.

On the downside, the program is not built to let users add their own components to the Smart Desktop dock. Moreover, we haven't seen a button for making the frame stay on top of other windows, which makes sense when collapsing it. We must also take into account that it has not been updated for while, but it has potential.