Big Ben Utility.
Turn your PC into Big Ben and chime the quarters and the hours with the sound of London's most famous bells.
This shareware utility is quite unobtrusive, and will play a section of the Westminster Chimes on each quarter-hour, and will mark each hour with a number of tolls of Big Ben itself.
To run the program you need an IBM-type PC (people have reported mixed results when running it on a Macintosh PC), running any version of Microsoft Windows or NT. You will need some multimedia capability and a sound card, but most PCs these days can run this program without any setup at all.
The program consists of only a few small files in their own directory. There are no files placed in any of your system directories and there are no modifications to any existing .ini files or your registry. Simplicity itself!
At the time of compilation, the program was free from all viruses but I recommend that you always check downloaded programs before running them.
To install the program, first create a directory folder somewhere on your hard disk, eg c:\BigBen.
Click here to download it. The program is a 32 bit, Windows95/98 or WindowsNT/XP version (1.9mb) (Version 2.2). The program comes with its own installer and a realistic recording of the chimes.
This will download a .zip file into your new directory. It only takes a few minutes usually. You will probably receive a warning message from your browser, but select any options along the lines of 'save it to disk', and then guide it to the directory folder you created. Unzip the files which are contained in the .zip file into the directory you created.
Then launch the Setup program by double-clicking on the Setup.exe Application program, and extensive instructions will be given to you.
The program will chime on each quarter hour and additionally will strike on the hour. Put a shortcut to it in your startup group for maximum efficiency. If you change the time on your system clock, the program may take up to a minute to re-synchronise itself.
We retain ownership of the program, but we can no longer offer paid support for it. The program is therefore free for you to use, but you accept responsibility that you run it at your own risk. You do not need any unlock codes, the program will not expire, and there are no adverts or nag screens. Most problems can be resolved by reference to the ‘readme’ file which you can find in the directory where you installed the program, probably c:\program files\bigben.