How to display seconds in Taskbar

The Taskbar Clock in Windows, displays the date and time. The day, month and the year are displayed – and the hour and minutes are seconds are displayed. In this post we will see how to display second in the Taskbar Clock.

Before we proceed, it is important to know, why Microsoft did not build this capability into the Windows operating system to begin with. Was the constant blinking of the colon too distractive?

Said Microsoft,

The blinking colon and the constantly-updating time were killing our benchmark numbers. On machines with only 4MB of memory (which was the minimum memory requirement for Windows 95), saving even 4K of memory had a perceptible impact on benchmarks. By blinking the clock every second, this prevented not only the code paths related to text rendering from ever being paged out, it also prevented the taskbar’s window procedure from being paged out, plus the memory for stacks and data, plus all the context structures related to the Explorer process. Add up all the memory that was being forced continuously present, and you had significantly more than 4K.

Now that we know why the Windows Taskbar Clock does not display seconds, let us move on.

We have already seen how to how to add day of week to taskbar clock,no let us see if we can add seconds to the Taskbar Clock time.

Display seconds in Taskbar Clock

There is no way to natively display seconds in the Taskbar Clock. If you wish to do so, you will have to use 3rd-party free tools like T-Clock Redux or TClockEx.

T-Clock Redux in an enhanced fork of Stoic Joker’s T-Clock 2010. Apart from letting you display the seconds too, it offers many other features. It works on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 too. TClockEx is such free tool that can help you show seconds. This one also lets you tweak additional options in the Takbar Clock.