A stopwatch with laps, on your PC

Lap time and total time

The lap table has three columns: the lap's number, the lap's own time and the total when it ended. Say you time three laps of a running track and press L at 01:02.40, 02:01.15 and 03:05.90:

Each lap's time is its total minus the total before it. Once there are two laps or more, Octoolo tags the quickest one Fastest and the longest one Slowest. The newest lap sits at the top of the table, so it is always in view.

Example: four fast laps with rests in between

Interval training mixes hard efforts with rests. To time only the hard parts, stop the stopwatch during each rest:

• Press Space as you set off on the first 400 meters.
• At the end of the lap, press L and then Space. The lap is recorded and the stopwatch stops for your rest.
• Press Space again (the button now reads Go on) as you start the next lap.

After four laps the table might read:

The total, 06:13.25, is your running time alone, and the last lap was 3.45 seconds slower than the third: a sign the pace was fading. If you leave the stopwatch running through the rests and press L at every change instead, the rests become laps too. Fastest and Slowest then compare every lap in the table, rests included, so a short rest can end up marked as the fastest lap.

The keys

• Space starts the stopwatch, stops it, and starts it again.
• L marks a lap, only while it runs.
• R resets it, only once it is stopped, so a stray key in the middle of a run does no harm.

The keys work while the stopwatch is on screen in Octoolo's window. They are not shortcuts for the whole of Windows, so pressing Space in another program does nothing to the stopwatch. They are also ignored while you type in a box on the page, so a search never starts it by accident. The buttons do the same jobs: the left one is Lap while it runs and Reset when it is stopped.

It keeps time while you do other things

The stopwatch does not tick inside the window. It keeps the moment you pressed Start in Octoolo's data folder and works out the time from the clock. So it keeps going while you use other tools, move elsewhere in Octoolo or close Octoolo altogether. Open the stopwatch again and it shows the whole time since you started, with every lap still in the table.

That makes it handy for timing a long job on the PC, an install, a backup or a render, while you get on with something else. One thing follows from it: time the PC spends asleep counts too, because the clock moved on. Press Stop before you put the PC to sleep if that time should not count.

The stopwatch never rings. To be told when time is up, use a countdown timer. To work in fixed blocks with breaks, the Pomodoro timer counts your focus minutes for you.

A stopwatch on a web page, or this one?

The stopwatch in a search result or on a website works fine for a quick count. It usually lives only as long as its tab, though: close the tab or the browser and the time and the laps go with it. Octoolo's stopwatch keeps both until you press Reset and marks your fastest and slowest laps without you comparing numbers.

What it does not do, so you know before you rely on it:

• One stopwatch. There is a single stopwatch. To follow several things at once, start several named timers instead.
• No lap export. Laps cannot be saved as a file or removed one by one; Reset clears them all.
• Only in the window. The time shows on the stopwatch page, not in the taskbar or a notification.