How in the Tech

Mute your speakers automatically when your PC is locked

By Adam Myers ⋅ April 27, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Multimedia

It should come as no surprise I spent a lot of time in front of a computer. One of the things that can drive me completely insane is the silence with just the hard drive clicking or fans whirring. Because of this, I always have some music playing in the background – even if it’s barely audible, it only needs to cut through the monotone silence of a quiet office environment. Do you suffer the same problem?

One of the side-effects of the continual music playback is how to handle the situation when you get up and leave the area, either for a few moments or an unknown length of time. It becomes a problem with your office door now open and broadcasting your musical tastes to the rest of the office. Your lone choice is to simply pause your media player and then resume when you are back at your desk area.

Mute on Lock is a handy utility in the scenario above, which I believe fits many people’s environments. The free portable software is rather no frills in it’s feature set – you’ve probably assumed the utility will mute the audio output when the PC is locked; you’d be correct with that assumption! In addition to the auto mute on lock, the application also provides keyboard shortcuts that can be used to toggle between mute and unmute. This is useful because, unfortunately, the software can’t unmute automatically when you return to your PC; a situation I assume because the Windows API doesn’t allow for this type of hook.

One thing that is important to note, Mute on Lock under Vista and Win 7 must be run in Windows XP Compatibility mode. Ask yourself how often this feature actually solved an issue for you with other applications? It’s not often but it’s the case here! Unsure how to do this? Right-click on the executable file and select Properties. Under the Compatibility tab, check the box titled Run this program in compatibility mode for and then set it to Windows XP.

Download Mute on Lock