On Windows, there’s an option to show the seconds on the taskbar clock, but it comes with a warning that it might reduce battery life if you switch it on. LTT Labs decided to look into this to see just how much of a thing this really is, and they concluded that yes, it does actually affect battery life. They saw a drop of about 5%-15%, depending on configuration.
In percentage terms, the drops weren’t massive. For most people, it probably won’t make or break your day. But if you’re on a long flight, running low on battery, or trying to squeeze out every last bit of endurance, it’s not entirely nothing either.
↫ Woolly Door at LTT Labs
I mean, having the second tick away on the click would drive me up the wall when I’m trying to use my computer, but I’m sure quite a few among you do enable the seconds display on your own setups (Windows or otherwise). I’m curious to see if the same battery life reduction is measurable on KDE, GNOME, or macOS.
Yeah, I guess refreshing the screen at 60 Hz can impact performance. Oops, not 60 times a second, but 60 times a minute. Those computers aren’t that smart and eco friendly. No wonder why Aero got replaced by a worse skin than Windows 3 (which had pseudo 3D on buttons) in Windows 8 and up. To save the battery.
It was already known that this happens; the article would have been more useful if they had ascertained why it happens and whether there are any solutions.
I do think showing seconds on the task bar is a personal preference and it was very silly it took Windows decades to provide an option to turn it on (I had to use a third-party app to tweak it until then, but now I’m Linux-only and the task bar clocks all allow seconds to be shown and have for decades). It seems like there should be options for: no seconds at all, seconds only when on mains power and seconds all the time, which will keep people happy in all the 3 possible scenarios.
The reason I want seconds on any clock I look at is that I often want to know if I have 1 minute to an HH:MM deadline for something important (a meeting, catching transport, etc) or just 1 second. Equally important is keeping the time synced properly, especially when showing the seconds. It’s why I used to have radio-syncing watches (until smartwatches came along and synced with my phone’s time [and, yes, my phone’s custom ROM lets me have seconds – yay!]) and I still have a radio-syncing analogue wall clock in my kitchen. Don’t talk to me about kitchen appliances that have a clock that doesn’t sync (think microwaves and even the latest coffee maker at my work) and lose their time completely when powered off – freaking pointless!
Basic bad design by overpolling. You can run the NT4.0 clock application on windows XP, vista and 7 just fine, as well as most litestep modules. Litestep modules takes a LOT less power in general, and the nt4 clock uses so little cpu time that it is invisible on an idle system. You can use the nt4 clock in windows 11 just fine without mods, size it to anything you want, select between digital or analogue.
Winfile also is available for more modern OS, but the nt4 one can do just about everything except show hidden files unless you enable that by a hack.
Any tips for getting your hands on the NT4 clock?
It’s such a silly topic, and yet quite interesting. I’d imagine the results depends a lot on the system and software.
On a system where the CPU is already awake and handling interrupts, then the additional energy & time to update the clock seems like it should be minuscule. However if the CPU would otherwise be allowed to sleep, then the mere act of waking up the CPU (without updating the clock) might use more energy than actually updating the clock. Whether it’s running on a performance versus efficiency core probably makes a difference too. If either the clock or compositor require the GPU to spin up cores every second, that’s probably not efficient even for a tiny workload. This could be one of the cases where an iGPU fairs better. Many tests are needed 🙂
After my work computer was upgraded to Windows 11, I really miss one Windows 10 feature: when I clicked on the time in the taskbar, the pop-up would show the time with seconds. I considered activating the “show seconds” option in Windows 11, but that would just be too annoying to have on.