Mute your PC with keyboard shortcut

Have you ever clicked a web link, only for an advert to hijack your speakers? It’s annoying at home, but can be hugely embarrassing if you’re in a quiet public space such as a library. Using a tool called Nircmd from Nirsoft, you can create a keyboard shortcut to quickly mute your speakers.

First, download Nircmd from www. snipca.com/33939 (scroll to the bottom for the download links) and run nircmd.exe from the ZIP file. In the window that appears, click Copy To Windows Directory (this lets you run Nircmd directly from the Start menu – see screenshot below right).

To create the mute shortcut, click Start, then type nircmd.exe cmdshortcutkey "~%folder.desktop%"

"Mute" "CTRL+SHIFT+M" mutesysvolume 1 (you can copy this command from our Pastebin account at www.snipca. com/33940). Press

Enter, and a new shortcut named Mute will appear on your desktop. To mute your speakers, simply press the Ctrl+shift+m keyboard shortcut. If you want to use a different shortcut, change the ‘CTRL+SHIFT+M’ section of the command you typed earlier. You can also drag the desktop shortcut to your Windows taskbar, letting you quickly mute your speakers with a single mouse click.

Finally, to create a shortcut to unmute your speakers, type nircmd.exe cmdshortcutkey "~%folder.desktop%" "Unmute" "CTRL+SHIFT+U" mutesysvolume 0 (copy the command from www.snipca.com/33941); again you can change the keyboard shortcut in this command if you like.