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I am using several application, which are really slow. They will stay unresponsive for between 1 second and up to five minutes and I do not have any good way of predicting their response times. This means that I will do other work and from time to time check whether the application has responded. Needless to say, this wastes a lot of time. Therefore, it would be great if there was a sound whenever the application responded. Because I cannot modify the application, the sound would have to come from a tool, which monitors the applications and whenever an application as not responded for more than, say 5 seconds, it will make a sound when it becomes responsive again.

There are several ways, in which the applications can become unresponsive. In one, the mouse will turn into an hour-glass whenever it is over the application, but task manager states that it is responding, in others, task manager will state that they are not responding.

Does such a tool exist?

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  • Is it about Windows?
    – Vi.
    Sep 12, 2011 at 12:30
  • It could exist, how much is it worth to you? haha, no really.
    – Tommy
    Sep 14, 2011 at 22:51
  • @Tommy. You can write to me at [email protected] and we can discuss it.
    – David
    Sep 15, 2011 at 9:13
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    @Noam N. Kremen I have tested now, and the "Not responding" state in task manager would catch about 5-10% of the cases. Of the the application is waiting for input from a central server, which leaves the GUI unresponsive, this means that the CPU usage is low during these periods.
    – David
    Sep 18, 2011 at 13:40
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    Then I can't think of a way to detect an idle state without changing the source code. Related discussion. Sep 18, 2011 at 14:08

1 Answer 1

1

You could achieve something like this with a simple powershell script.

e.g.:

while(1)
{

if((Get-Process Notepad).Responding -match "False")
{
    $toggle=1;
}

sleep 3;

if((Get-Process Notepad).Responding -match "True" -and $toggle -eq 1)
{
    [System.Media.SystemSounds]::Exclamation.Play();
    $toggle=0;
}

}

Open up a notepad instance then run this script. Once in notepad, try opening up a binary around 5 - 10MB. Once the binary data is displayed and Notepad becomes responsive again, Windows will make the exclamation sound. This can be easily modified to incorporate multiple processes and Windows includes numerous other sounds out of the box. The script incorporates a 3 second delay between checks to cut down on unnecessary CPU cycles.

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