Hi.

the other day, my faithful old cube clock decided to give up the ghosts on me. This didn't present a problem as far as telling the time or even having an alarm call goes, sinse I have a very useful talking keyring clock (and I can look on my desk top anyway for the time).

The one function of my cube clock I really do miss though, is the announce every hour mode.

I do various things, such as writing, interactive fiction, playing games of various sorts and generally reading stuff (either books, or internet research on topics that interest me, like the history of computers or the chemistry of coffee).

anyway, all of these sorts of things are incredibly absorbing, and over the past few nights, I've managed to get myself totally tied up in projects to such an extent that I've ended up missing lots of sleep and been incredibly knackered the next day as a consequence.

And when I say missing sleep, we're talking about me not realizing the time from ten one night to six the next morning!

this is why having hourly time checks is so important for me.

It ddid occur to me, that there is probably a talking clock esque program out there, or maybe I can persuade windows to pop up messages every hour?

I did locate one program, called "Steve's talking clock" but this appeared to cost ten dollars, and had lots of features that I wouldn't really be bothered about, such as changing the voice of the clock, and even being able to get a different voice to automatically announce the time every 15 minutes. Personally though, hourly announcements would be enough for my purposes, and this is one situation where I really don't care about voice quality, ----- though one with westminster chimes wwould be sort of cool.

So, does anyone know either if there's a free talking clock program available somewhere, or if it's possible to get windows to alert you every hou?

A friend of mine says outlook will do this type of thing, but everytime I start up outlook, it wants to configure itself to be my default E-mail program, and sinse outlook express is already set up to use all the tortuous university E-mail malarchy, I really don't want to go messing about with it.

Any help would be much appreciated.