I've been tinkering around with this free software for a while now called rainmeter (
http://rainmeter.net/cms/). Its pretty much a site where you can download the software with links to others where the "skins" are. The skins are actually what you would download to customize the looks of your cpu or laptop backgrounds (which are sometimes included in the zip file or just pick one off the googles that you like). These skins include things like weather, RSS feeds, docks for utilities and a number of other things; even a cool little "Hal 9000" skin. To really get into deeper customization, you may be required to understand programming code just a wee bit. I'm sure some of you have seen this or something like it already but for those that have not, its sort of addicting. I'm thinking when I have time I will create an Auburn theme and post it for those who uses rainmeter.