NirCmd - An Amazing Little Utility

Many of the programs we use in our office make different sounds when they need attention. We use Miranda-IM to ‘chat’ between desks and Pegasus for our internal e-mail program. Both of these work much better if you can get an audio cue when a new message comes in. Some folks in the office feel they need to mute their sounds which means they do not always notice when a new message is sent to them that a call or client is waiting for them. I found a little utility called NirCmd that will unmute the system sound. By running it in everyone’s task scheduler every half hour I can ensure that the sound is usually turned on.

Here are some of the things this program can do:

• Increase & Decrease the system volume
• Mute & UnMute the system volume
• Create shortcuts
• Turn off the monitor
• Start the default screen saver
• Put your computer in ’standby’ mode
• Log off the current user
• Ask if you want to reboot, and if you answer ‘Yes’, reboot the computer.
• Turn off your computer
• Minimize all your Internet Explorer windows
• Close/Hide/Show all your Internet Explorer windows
• Close all your Explorer windows (My Computer, folders, and so on)
• Hide/Show the start button on the system tray
• Hide/Show the clock on the system tray
• Set the display mode
• Open the desired Registry key/value in RegEdit
• Enable/Disable the screen saver
• Change the date/time of the specified filename (creation time and modified time)
• Open & Close CD-ROM drives
• and many others

Besides being a very interesting way to ‘haunt’ someone’s computer, I can see a number of different ways to use this little program.