Are you a military person who's completely ingrained in understanding 17:34 rather than the simplistic 5:34 PM? Or maybe you simply want to get rid of AM and PM altogether considering you must be in one very scary place not to be able to figure out whether or not it's day time or night time while sitting at your computer! Personally, it saves me the space to stick in one more taskbar icon!
In order to change how the time is displayed on your computer, click on Start, Control Panel, and choose Regional and Language Options.
Next, on the dialog, click the Customize button underneath the Standards and formats section. Below that button, you'll also see an example of how each setting is currently configured for Number, Currency, Time, Short Date, and Long Date.
Finally, click the Time tab and you can now change the format in the Time Format textbox.
When you open it, however, it really is not very helpful since it pretty much looks the same except for the lowercase and uppercase letters. Here's the guide on how to set the time format:
The uppercase H or HH stands for 24-hour format, whereas the lower case h and hh means 12-hour format. The single h is if you do not want to display leading zeros for single digit hours and hh is if you want a leading zero.
So in our case if you want the time in 24-hour format, choose H:mm:ss. With the defaults, the minutes and seconds will also display leading zeros for single digit numbers, but you can simply delete one m and one s if you don't want those displayed either! Here are the rules if you want to type in your own time format:
Display time in a 24-hour format - Type uppercase H or HH for the hour
Display time in a 12-hour format - Type lowercase h or hh for the hour
Display leading zeros in single-digit hours - Type two characters, HH or hh
Suppress the display of leading zeros in single-digit hours, minutes, or seconds - Type a single uppercase H, or lowercase letter, such as h, m, or s
Display a single letter to indicate AM or PM - Type lowercase t
Display two letters to indicate AM or PM - Type lowercase tt
Display text - Type single quotation marks (') around text
If you noticed there is an option called Display text so that if you feel like having some fun, you can put in your own text!
Enjoy!