Clock

It can prove a difficult activity to get out of bed in the morning, especially without an alarm to help you out. However, a large variety of devices are now equipped with tools to set up alarms, even your computer. There are an abundance of third-party solutions such as Clock, which are easy to configure.

The application comes in a lightweight package, and it takes little time to get it installed on your computer. Launching it brings up a small, custom clock on your desktop, and you can easily identify it right above the tray area.

The slim window makes it easy to figure out what it’s all about, and constantly shows the system time. A couple of buttons let you close the program and minimize it to the tray area and leave it only show up when the alarm is configured.

It’s a good idea to access the options panel first, and this is done from the corresponding context menu. Here is the place where you get to configure the alarm. There’s a preset audio file which acts as the alert, and you can pick a custom one, but it needs to be under the WAV format. You can select a different skin from the couple available.

Unfortunately, you can only configure one alarm, and it’s not possible to have two separate instances of the application running at the same time. Only an audio alert can be configured, with no option to set a message as well. However, you can set the program’s clock to sync with one of various preset online sources, but an active Internet connection is required for this to work.

Bottom line is that alarms help a lot in daily activities, even to get you out of bed. Clock is a straightforward tool, which can only be used as a one-time alarm. You can’t set it to be recurrent, unless manually launching the app every time you run the compute, and alerts only come in the form of audio.