How to Change Time Format in Windows

Many of the visitors here use Windows System. The most common observation is that people use the same installation done by their dealer for years without even restoring the backup they have been provided. Its better for users to reinstall Windows after some time as there may be some performance changes during the period of time due to repeated installation and removal of third party softwares

Usually the time format after a fresh Windows installation will be in 24 hour format which is most undesirable for many of the users. You can change time format from default 24 hours to 12 hour format just within few seconds. Here is how one can achieve that.


Open Control Panel > Regional and Language Options


Now, click Customize this format button. You will be shown up with customization window, goto time tab.


The default 24 hour format will be displayed as HH:mm:ss. If you want to change time format, you need to change the way as you wish depending on the instructions / notations given in the image. In simple words, if you want to have your new time format to be of 12 hour type, modify the default HH:mm:ss to hh:mm:ss. Now you will see the changes come into effect after you click Apply / OK. The same procedure works fine with Windows XP or Windows VISTA

Diffrence Between Actual “Size” and “Size On Disk”

Many Of you might have noticed that while you see the properties of some folder their are two sizes shown over there in properties window. Those sizes are labeled as “Size” & “Size on disk”. You can also notice that size on disk is always greater than actual size. So, here is the explanation of these two terms.

• Size – It is sum of sizes of all containing files and folders in it, in raw form (count of number of bytes).
• Size on disk - It displays the effective size which they occupy in disk.

It is the file system of hard disk which determines the “Size on Disk”, where as “Size” will remain same, irrespective of file system (like NTFS, Fat32, UDF, etc.).

The disk is further divided into tracks and sectors, file system determines how many tracks or sectors to be included in one cluster. So, if the disk is having a cluster size of 16KB (generally in case of FAT file system). Any file on that disk will have size on disk in multiples of 16KB. So, a file size up to 16KB will occupy 16KB as disk space and file from size 16 to 32KB will occupy 32KB on disk space and so on.

In this way a large volume of disk space gets unused. So, there is a need of file system having smaller cluster size. This is one reason Microsoft came up with a new file system NTFS, after windows millennium.