Windows 7: If you like visual indicators for things like disk capacity, battery life, memory usage, and speaker volume, and you like them prominent and easy to find, SuperbarMonitor puts easy to read indicators right on your Superbar.

If you’ve played around with system monitoring apps before and found them too technical or too overwhelmingly packed with widgets and data, you’ll find a lot to like about Superbar Monitor. The indicators sit on your Superbar like program icons and give a broad overview like whether or not your CPU is pegging or you’re chewing up a lot of RAM.

Each Superbar Monitor segment is an individual program so you only need to grab the modules you want. Don’t want the battery meter because you’re on a desktop? Don’t even bother downloading it. The available monitoring modules are: battery, volume, disk space—you can run multiple monitors for multiple disks, just copy the disk monitor executable—CPU, and memory.

You can tweak the settings on each module to display an overlay icon—seen in the screenshot above with icons for disk, CPU, and memory usage as well as volume—a percentage, or no overlay icon at all. Each module has function specific tweaks too like what percentage is “critical” on the meters measuring system resources.

Note: If you want to take advantage of the more detailed mouse-over view—as seen above—don’t minimize the Superbar applications, although you can leave them open behind the applications you’re currently using. Windows 7 doesn’t show the preview for minimized applications.

The link below is a Google Translate version of the German site, you can read it in the original German here. Superbar Monitor is freeware, Windows only. Have a handy system monitoring application you’d like to share? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Reader karmat’s Windows 7 desktop uses WindowBlinds to skin the entire interface with matching wallpaper and Rainmeter configurations for an impressive overall desktop effect.

The desktop is a combination of:

• Vintage Deco WindowBlind by Boltzfan
• Cubist Realities Wallpaper by Andrew Lahman
• Win7prem CursorFX by B2R
• Token Icons by Brsev Packaged by Naymlezwun
• Dark Rainmeter Time|Date by JSMorley
• Century Gothic Notes by TaipanSnake
• Tabmeter Rainmeter Icons by PS2

Bonus points for a color scheme that reminds me of the old Lifehacker site themes. Great job, karmat!

This desktop not your style? Why waste time complaining? Instead, get started creating your own killer desktop with the easy-install Rainmeter 1.1 package and show the world what you can do. If you get stuck and need some help, join up with the Lifehacker Desktop Customization Google Group to collaborate on new ideas for desktop configurations.

Once you’ve created your own beautifully tweaked (and hopefully productive) desktop, post it over in the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell Flickr Group complete with a description of the programs and tweaks you used (and preferably links as well!), and we just might feature it here.