Easy Clock With Seconds On Windows 11

This is the best method I could find to easily obtain for myself a precious and coveted semi-Windows-10-style clock on Windows 11. 

Microsoft seems not to want us to know the time in seconds. I'm not really sure why. Official reasons focus on how much of a performance hit our computers would suffer from the overhead of displaying a clock with seconds. I can imagine that in 1975 this would have been a serious issue. Perhaps even in the 1990s. But in 2024?

There were digital watches in the 70s with seconds. By the early 80s, these were available for only a few dollars. I doubt they would have had more than a few bytes of RAM in them. Surely it must be possible for a modern PC to display the time in seconds, on demand, without overly bogging down the machine?

There has been an option to enable seconds on the small digital clock that appears on the bottom corner of the taskbar. This option seems to work sometimes and not others. I get the impression that Microsoft cannot decide if they want to let us see the time in seconds on our Windows machines this easily, or not. Even when this was working, it didn't show the nice analogue clock that was so easy to access in Windows 10.

This is what I have on my Windows 11 installs currently. It seems to work nicely.

Use This Setting to Enable Easily Seeing the Time in Seconds on Windows 11

Right-click on the desktop (or anywhere you can make a shortcut—don't worry, you can delete the shortcut soon and this will still work), and select "New -> Shortcut".

Under "Type the location of the item", enter 

control.exe timedate.cpl

Under "Type a name for this shortcut", enter

Time and Date

(or anything you would like to call it).

Then, right-click on the new shortcut and select "Pin to start".

The new shortcut will appear on the start menu.

You can now delete the shortcut from the desktop and the one in the start menu will still be there and still work.

CAUTION: If you click on the "Change date and time..." it is possible to change your system date and time". If you don't click on this, it's completely fine to use this as a clock to see the time in seconds.

I haven't found a better way to do it.

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