I am looking for a nice clock program for windows. I want to have an icon in the upper corner with the time. I hide the menu bar so I can’t use the clock that is there. Anybody have some suggestions?
Remember the old Nixie tubes?
Scott’s Nixie Tube Freeware Clock
Been using this about a year now. Very retro, very cool.
That is pretty keen thanks.
Thanks for the suggestion. Installed a minute ago. It’s cute, but here’s what I need:
I do not hide my menu bar, so the standard Windows clock is in a very good place. Unobtrusive, not covering any of my work. But it does not display the seconds.
The Windows 3.1 clock had an option to display the seconds, but they took it out for Windows 95 and never put it back. Does anyone know of a Registry key or some other way I can get the Windows clock to show seconds?
They removed the seconds from the clock on the taskbar because it wasted memory and had a significant impact on performance. I know that it seems strange that such a small thing would have such a big impact, but it did. The fact that the clock was updating constantly meant that the process which updated the taskbar could never be swapped out of memory. And updating the screen, even that very small portion, every second slowed things down enough to be noticeable.
I’ve been programming Windows since version 2.0 and we were shocked at how slow Windows 95 was. We learned about the above and much more when we worked with Microsoft to figure out how to make things paint faster in our application.
I use SymmTime to keep my clocks right on my various PCs at home, but I think it also has a nice little desktop clock as part of it, too.
If you were using Windows Vista (I’m assuming you’re not), it comes with a built-in “sidebar” that comes with a standard ‘analog’ clock that you can change styles and turn off/on the second hand. There’s a picture here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/sidebargadgets.mspx
If upgrading OSs is not in your forecast, you could try another gadget/widget program. Konfabulator is a popular one, and looking in their “Date and Time” category for widgets (little programs you add that stay on your screen in whatever position you choose) there’s a TON: http://www.widgetgallery.com/index.php?category=2
I have two monitors on my computer. For reasons I don’t understand I cannot move this clock to the secondary monitor.
Thanks. I always suspected that to be the reason, except there are SO many programs which DO update themselves constantly. Not to mention just one example, the afore-mentioned Scott’s Nixie Tube Freeware Clock.
Hmmmmm. If my laptop were functioning properly, I could offer to help troubleshoot, but as things stand, I got nothin’.
But I’m tickled pink that you gave it a try!
I can’t see how it would affect that much memory usage.
The Nixie Tube clock is right now using 1,176K of memory, according to Task Manager.
For comparison, Explorer is using 6,932K, Trillian is using 11,624K, Zone Alarm is using 2,940K and Opera is using 81,000K.
Doesn’t seem like too much of a memory hog to me.
You remember that Windows 3.1 ran on PCs with like 2-4 MB of RAM, right? Nixie Tube would use 25-50% of that.
Sysmetrix can display a clock and also system usage info like memory and CPU utilization. It has a few different styles for the clocks, including plain vanilla analog clock, old-fashioned chronograph watch, and digital. You can place the clock anywhere on the screen, use “always on top” mode. You can indicate a level of transparency, and set it to pass clicks through to whatever is behind it. (In that mode you can still move it around with something like ALT plus mouse). The only thing you can’t do is adjust the size.
I used to use it all the time and it’s convenient (or distracting, depending on your point of view) to have it in the corner when showing a PowerPoint presentation.
I don’t know offhand how much memory or CPU it uses.
Free at www.xymantix.com/sysmetrix/
So far I like Sysmetrix’s clock the best. Thanks CookingWithGas.
As was noted, Windows used to run on machines with very little RAM. And you can’t compare an application to the OS. If it’s just an application slowing you down, you can stop using that application. But if the OS itself is slowing things down, everybody suffers. Microsoft removed the seconds from the clock to improve the performance of the OS and every application that runs on the OS gets the benefit of that performance boost. It might be slight, but every little bit helps.
No registry key, but there are a few programs out that’ll do this. I use AlfaClock Free. alfasoftweb.com