Tuesday, September 23, 2014

AlphaClock for Your Desktop

Have you ever wanted a clock display someplace else on your desktop instead of only the bottom right part of the status bar?  Well, here is one that you can put anywhere on the screen, set the color to your liking, and even have it display UTC time.  AlphaClock is "Freeware" and is a very small program.  Just download the self-extracting EXE file from HERE, run it to extract the files to the folder of your choice, then RUN it by double-clicking on "aclock.exe" in the extracted files.

Once you have AlphaClock running on your desktop, you can right-click on the clock display and choose your color scheme, UTC time, and have it start when Windows starts.  Left-click and hold on the clock and you can drag it anywhere on the screen.  As you can see in the above image, I have AlphaClock set to the "Amber" color scheme and have positioned it right above the callsign entry field in N1MM.  The small "u" at the left means AlphaClock is displaying UTC Time.  (Click on the image to view it larger.)  It makes it super convenient to see the time since I'm focused on the callsign entry window most of the time I am contesting.  With it displaying UTC, there is no need for me to "convert" my computer clock time.  If you choose, it will also display 12-hour time.  And, just hover the mouse over it and the Day / Date is displayed.  Plus, it always sits on "Top" of all other windows so it's always visible.  AlphaClock will run on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 or Windows XP and I have it working just fine on Windows 7/64.