When people started using their mobile phones to keep track of time, watches started to be left at home more often. Why bring an extra device when our phone can do the same thing right? However, if you are using a Windows Mobile device, chances are you are using a plug-in with your time and date management. Instead why not place those information on the top bar where you can view it in almost all applications?

This hack allows you to set the top bar to show date, time, date and time, battery or nothing at all. Fortunately, this hack just deals with 2 entries, which are grouped together in

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shell\

and the entries I am talking about are

ShowTitleBarClock

TBOpt

To make it easier for you to decide which tweak you want to use, I have attached screen shot to show you the various results. Do remember to do a registry backup before processing in case of problems and also to soft-reset after changing the registry values for the effect to take place.

Show Only Time

The above is the screen shot to show only the time on. To achieve this, both ShowTitleBarClock and TBOpt must be set to 1.

Show Only Date

If you would instead like to show only the date in the top bar, then set ShowTitleBarClock to 1 and TBOpt to 2.

Show Both Date and Time

Some of use would prefer to have all the information on the top bar and if you are one such person, then the date and time can be placed there. It would be smaller than having either but if this is your choice, then set ShowTitleBarClock to 1 and TBOpt to 3.

Show Nothing

If you prefer to keep your top bar nice and clean, then removing both date and time from it is possible as well. Set ShowTitleBarClock to 1 and TBOpt to 0.

Show Battery

Then there are those who wear watches and would instead prefer to have something else in the top bar, such as the battery charge status. For these people, set ShowTitleBarClock to 0 and TBOpt to 1.

In Summary

Play around to see which tweak works best for you. If you have too many icons in the top bar, as I do, then you might notice that some of these icons might be cut off. For me, when I chose to show both date and time, the year got cut off by the ‘x’ button program.

Thanks to Adrian for this tip!

Which tweak did you use?

Tags: registry hack