HOW TO GET THE LOOK
For our gaming desktop, we wanted something bold, unfussy and with fast access to the games. Credit to Urim Berisha on YouTube, who gave us the idea for this setup.
First, we need to download the open-source Windows customisation tool Rainmeter ( rainmeter.net). When you first install Rainmeter, it has three default “skins” loaded, which are really just widgets. One of them – a system resource monitor that measures CPU, RAM and SWAP usage – is quite handy for a gaming rig, so we’re going to keep that. Right-click on the other two and select “Unload skin”, as well as the Rainmeter intro skin in the centre of the screen.
Now we need to download two other Rainmeter skins for our gaming desktop. The first is called Interactive Dock ( pcpro.link/315rain), which creates a Mac-like floating dock that’s going to act as a taskbar substitute. The second is called GameHub, which you can get from pcpro.link/315hub.
Install both and open Rainmeter from the system tray. Under “Active skins”, open the “A dock” folder and double-click the dock.ini file. The dock should now appear on your desktop, and you should find that you can drag it to the side of the screen. It will disappear after a few seconds and then reappear when you drag the mouse in that screen area.
At the bottom of the dock, you should see a gamepad icon. Right-click it, select “List file” and open that in Notepad. Under Gamecover2=controller.png edit the line below it to the following:
Gamedir2=[!ActivateConfig ‘’GameHUB’’ ‘’ListSpectrum.ini’’]
Now, when you click on the gamepad in the dock, you’ll get a tiled menu showing a set of default games. You can rightclick on the tiles to edit them for the games installed on your PC.
Some finishing touches are needed. Hide all the icons on your desktop to keep it nice and clean by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop and selecting View | Hide desktop icons. Then, rightclick on the taskbar, choose “Taskbar settings” and select “Automatically hide the taskbar in desktop mode” to make that go away too, until you drag the mouse to the foot of the screen. Finally, choose a striking, gaming-themed desktop background (ours is from
Fortnite because we have a mental age of around 12).
If you get stuck on any of this, Urim Berisha’s video ( pcpro.link/315urim) shows a more complicated setup, but covers all the steps we’ve shown here.