Ever wished Windows XP let you pick and choose what time data to display in the taskbar clock? XP has an annoying habit of losing tray process tooltips under the taskbar, and the tray clock often just doesn't respond at all to mouse-overs.

Today I discovered I don't have to fight with it anymore, because there's TClock Light: a free taskbar clock replacement that grants a much greater degree of configurability. I set it to show the 3-letter day, 3-letter month and date. I keep my taskbar set to two lines height, so the second line show hours, minutes and SECONDS. Yes, holy carp, a seconds ticker without having to double-click and bring up a redundant time dialog. The only way this could be better is if it let you reduce the day-of-week abbreviation to 1 letter (By convention adopted in my college days, when a magazine of course schedules was printed on pulp stock every semester - I abbreviate Sunday as "U" and Thursday as "R".)

Plus, handy feature if you compute in the kitchen or lab or just need a reminder to call someone back in an hour - it has an integrated timer, more accessible than Task Scheduler.

In the bad old days, functionality like this was often supported by spyware/adware. This isn't an issue with TClock; evidently the author found it sufficiently rewarding to learn stuff in the process of creating TClock, so it doesn't pop up ads, change your home page, hijack search engines, none of that.