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Friday, January 9, 2009

Add DAY and DATE to Your Taskbar Clock

Normally when you hover your mouse over the clock in your Taskbar, it will display the date. I get frustrated often when I try that and my computer fails to display it. Just another Windows ANNOYANCE! So today I found a small utility program that will change the display of the clock so that it prints out whatever I want! I decided to have it display the DAY, DATE, and TIME - All The Time! That way, I never have to "mouse over" the time to see the date. As an "extra added attraction" this program will display a Calendar on your screen when you simply left-click once on that part of the Taskbar. This calendar can then be moved anywhere on your screen and it stays on top of all your other programs. (NOTE: You must open TClockEX Properties, click on the "Calendar" tab, and un-select the "Close when not active" button in order to have the Calendar stay visible all the time.)

Here is a screen shot of my taskbar with the program installed and running:

You can right-click on this part of the Taskbar and choose TClockEx Properties and adjust it to display pretty much whatever you want. You can also choose the colors of the background and the text as well as the font and text size. I changed the Default display so that the Day would display as one digit if less than 10, I removed the seconds display, and I added the AM/PM indicator. I also changed the text and background colors and under the Calendar tab, chose the "Remember Last Position" option. Here is the Clock Format that you see in the above screen shot:

ddd, d MMM yyyy h:mm tt

The program can be downloaded HERE just click on the "Download" link on the left and then click on the "tclockex.exe" link under the "EXE File" column. It comes as a self-extracting EXE (executable) file. Just run it and it will install on your computer and can be uninstalled later if you wish. The author says it will work on Windows 95, 98, NT and XP. I am running XP Pro and it seems to function perfectly. This is FREEware so it fits anyone's budget!

After it is installed, just right-click on this part of the Taskbar and select TClockEX Help. This will give you all the directions for using this neat little utility.