Not many people will care, but for many, there is something particularly tragic about Windows: not showing seconds in taskbar. Believe us: there are many complaints about this.

This decision comes from afar. Afar. It had something to do with the 4″.megabyte“RAM memory This was the minimum requirement to install Windows 95. Now our computers are usually 8 or 16 concerts It has RAM, but in Windows 10 only a hack gives access to functionality not natively available in Windows 11. Why? A Microsoft engineer is trying to explain this… and we’re not convinced (too much).

Show seconds affects performance (they say)

Raymond Chen is not just any. Named by some ‘Microsoft’s Chuck Norris’, this engineer was one of those responsible for fighting for backward compatibility in Windows, and he knows very well what he’s talking about when it comes to this operating system.

It was he who announced in 2003 Why didn’t Windows 95 show seconds? in the taskbar. Early versions did and even flashed colons (“:”) like some watches do. “But we had to remove it.”

Why? Well, because that option was “killing our performance figures.” On machines with 4 MB of RAM, which is the minimum requirement for Windows 95 Even 4K memory savings “made a noticeable impact in benchmarks”, but things like the flashing of the colon had a noticeable effect on many other areas of the system. Chen then concluded by saying, “The fastest code is the code that doesn’t work.”

Almost 20 years later, this engineer has taken up the issue again and hasn’t taken it lightly. We stopped talking in terms of “megs” of RAM in our computers a long time ago, and we now have 4, 8, 16 or even more gigabytes of RAM. Shouldn’t make this an issue anymore, should it?

Don’t do that.

Chen explained how on terminal servers the problem is that each user has their own clock that needs to be updated every second, so “the system spends the CPU updating the clocks” because the clock would have to be “redrawn” every second to show this change.

The same reason in these systems cursor blink disabled (‘hat’) when writing a text. This, he claims, “turns into a lot of wasted CPU cycles”.

What about traditional end-user systems? Why can’t a normal user have seconds in the taskbar? The option was (and is) available in Windows 10 with a minor change we can make with the registry editor, but Microsoft has disabled this option in Windows 11: There is no direct way to show the seconds on the clock in the taskbar.

For Chen, the answer remains the same: yield. As he explains on his blog ‘The Old New Thing’, which is part of the Microsoft Developer Blog Network, the clock is still counterproductive:

“Any periodic activity with a speed greater than one minute is reviewed by the Windows performance team because periodic activity prevents the CPU from entering a low power state.

Unlike telling the user where to type or making a video play smoothly, updating the seconds in the taskbar clock is not important to the UI.

And the recommendation is that non-essential periodic timers have a minimum duration of one minute and enable timer defragmentation to minimize system wakeups.”

The logic is strictly consistent with the architecture of Windows operating systems, but the truth is surprising, especially when other operating systems offer the option to display seconds. performance without appearing to be affected.

macOS preferences let you enable seconds to be displayed on the taskbar.

macOS does; the option is accessible from Preferences and So are linux systems.: In GNOME we can enable it with a command from the terminal, for example, and this option can also be enabled on KDE desktops.

In Windows 11 it is not possible to see the seconds in the taskbar, although they are shown. if we access the date and time settingsAs you can see in the header image.

Then what can be done in Windows 11? Well, in the absence of Microsoft re-enabling this option natively, an alternative set a different system clock. One that offers this possibility is ElevenClock, whose code is available on GitHub in case anyone wants to audit it.