Rainmeter is an awesome way to monitor your system stats, check your Gmail or just display anything you like. It's worth checking out, and it can be downloaded from here.

Rainmeter can be difficult to learn, you can try the manual, or you can start by downloading other people's work and seeing how they have accomplished things and working from there.

There are several good sites for Rainmeter skins, including customize.org and DeviantArt.

The panels on the right contain screenshots of my own custom skins available to download via DeviantArt. Feel free to modify these skins, just give credit for any code used!

You can click on the image to view a larger full size image of how it looks, or click on the download link to be taken to my DeviantArt page where the files are stored.

All of the downloadable files contain everything necessary to use that skin and contain all graphics and background images. One of the great things about Rainmeter is that everything is editable, if you want to change a small detail to be more how you like it, then you can. I've tried to code the skins so that everything can be tweaked to be just how you like it.