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Table of Contents Introduction Standard Win32 Timers Multimedia Timers Waitable Timers Queue Timers Conclusion Introduction The goal of this article is to show the practical use of different kinds of timers. First, we will see how to use the standard Win32 timers, then switch to multimedia timers, mention waitable timers and queue timers. I will try to make some general comparison between these solutions. So called high-resolution timer based on functions QueryPerformanceFrequency and QueryPerformanceCounter will not be taken into account because it can be used only to measure time intervals, and not to fire events in regular time intervals. According to MSDN, An application uses a timer to schedule an event for a window after a specified time has elapsed. It means that if we create a timer and specify a time interval of uElapse milliseconds, it will do something every uElapse milliseconds, until we destroy it. It is up to us to specify what something is. Timers are a useful feature offered to programmers by the OS. However, they can be easily misused: using timers for different kinds of polling (e.g. check every 200 milliseconds if the user entered some value into the edit box), is almost never a good idea. Good candidates for using timers are applications which do not depend that much on users actions, but rather on time flow. It is important to understand that the accuracy of timers is limited. Windows is not a real-time operating system (except Windows CE) and it is not reasonable to expect timers to handle very small time intervals (10 ms, for instance). Standard Win32 Timers When the term timer is used, it is almost always referred to this kind of timer. I use the term Win32 timer in this article simply to make a distinction between them and other timers. In some texts, these timers are called user timers because they are not kernel objects, unlike waitable and queue timers. How do Win32 timers work? First, we create a timer, specify its elapse time, an