Is that plain old Vista or XP desktop background boring you to death? Do you ever wish you could step it up a notch and show some love for Halo 3 in the process? Well now you can with some help from Lifehacker reader rykennedyan.

He craftily modified the Rainmeter customizable application for Windows, with a Halo 3 kick of course. Almost every element on the HUB has an actual function.

Click the jump to see the configuration overview…

Grenades – Each grenade launches a specific application. I currently have them set to, from left to right, Pidgin, Steam, Foobar, and Firefox.

Power Drainer – Opens a Shutdown menu. You can choose Shutdown, Restart, and Sleep

Health Bar – Displays current track progress, with artist and title above it.

Battle Rifle and Ammo Count – Displays current unread message count from Gmail and the Battlerifle opens Gmail.

Ammo Clip – Top clip is download traffic; bottom clip is upload traffic.

Radar – As of now, all this does is download and save an image for the local radar from Weather Underground. I’m currently editing a GIMP script which will automatically crop and edit the picture to display properly upon download. What you see here is the intended look. It also displays the current temperature.

Time and Game Type – Display current time and date.

Blue Score and Red Score – Display current CPU and RAM usage.

Player Callsigns – These behave just like my TweetScanner skin.

Battlerifle Ammo Count – Displays current battery status; it displays 0 in this picture because I’m using my desktop which is not on a battery.

Also, the visor outline is done in Rainmeter as well.

Kudos for the original concept. This is one of the more unique ways I’ve seen Windows skinning put to use. Too bad the snapshot wasn’t of a headshot or some poor soul running around with a sticky grenade stuck to his back. But this will do :-)