Software, which will make a sound when an application becomes responsive again

Question

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?

Answer 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.