What program should I use on a secondary monitor to show status, media information, and IMs?

I've got a secondary 15" monitor hooked up to my computer (my main monitor is a 23") and I would like to be able to just have it display information such as: computer status (CPU, Memory, temperatures), Media Information (when playing music through iTunes for example) and Instant Messages. I've seen little 7-10" USB monitors that display the same information, but I don't know what software they are running, although I'm sure it's proprietary. I'm running Vista on a Intel Core i7 920 with 3GB of RAM.