I drag my laptop between different environments pretty often, and it’s a hassle to remember that what was appropriate in the hotel room isn’t always on the plane — you can get your head out of the gutter, I’m mostly concerned that I left music or a movie playing.

Solution:
I created a task (This is all in Vista, but I’ll be upgrading to XP anydaynow, so I’ll verify that it works there) that is triggered on log-on, start-up, lock and unlock that runs “NirCmd mutesysvolume 1″. NirCmd is a little 29kb app that can change things from the command line (the software seems safe after a causal googling, although it’s sometimes included in viruses because it’s useful).

Making a new task is so straightforward I won’t go through it in detail:

1. Launch Task Scheduler, if you can’t find it, just run “%SystemRoot%\system32\taskschd.msc /s”
2. Make a new task (Mine lives in the Microsoft folder since I had trouble making a new folder) that triggers on “log-on, start-up, lock and unlock” those are probably your best options
3. Make an action that “Starts a program” point it to NirCmd with the arguments “mutesysvolume 1″
4. Save it and you’re good to go.

I was going to include the exported XML of the task, but importing is almost as complex as making it yourself, the paths are hard coded and it also runs my really simple logging batch file for testing “LogSomething mute muting.txt”.

Addendum: LogSomething.bat

@rem Syntax: LogSomething Event File
@echo off
echo %1: ------- >> %2
date /t >> %2
time /t >> %2
echo ----------- >> %2