ALARM

Waking up in the morning is probably the day’s most difficult activity. Alarm clocks help in this regard, but they can also be used to help you remind of upcoming events or tasks you need to perform. These are also the intentions of ALARM, a lightweight application which is easy to configure and use.

The application comes in a pretty lightweight package which doesn’t even take you through the steps of an installer to make it work. You can check out the set of features from the moment it reaches your computer, and deploy it on a thumb drive to always have a personal alarm clock at hand, without affecting the health status of the target PC.

Since aesthetics are not the center of attention here, there isn’t a lot of effort invested in the visual design. A compact window stores all features in an organized manner. Several drop-down menus help you select the exact hour, minute, and second when the alarm to kick in. Hitting the “OK” button arms the alarm and you can attend to other activities.

Unfortunately, the application always stays in the taskbar even if minimized, with no possibility to send it to the tray area. However, when the appropriate time comes, the window shows up on the desktop, and there’s a button to stop the audio alert, but no possibility to snooze, unless you manually configure a new alarm.

You have little to no control over the audio file used for the alert. There is, however, the possibility to change it, but this needs to be manually done by replacing the WAV file in the source directory, and also keeping the original name. There’s an additional option to lock the computer, but it can’t be set to trigger when the alarm kicks in.

All things considered, we can state that ALARM is a lightweight, straightforward alarm clock which is sure to get you out of bed in the morning, given you keep the PC awake overnight. Even if it comes with a shallow set of features, you can carry it on a thumb drive, change the audio alert, and lock the workstation in the meantime.