At work I have a laptop running Windows 7 and every lunchtime, as I lunch away from my desk, I lock the machine.
Except what I should do is pause iTunes, set my IM status to Away, and then lock it but I forget to do all that most days and just bash Windows+L.
However, I’ve found two small, free, applications that will now allow me to do all that with one mouse gesture, specifically it will pause iTunes, set my IM status to Away/Idle, mute the laptop speakers and turn off the screen.
Hot Corners handles the mouse gesture (and allows you set to other actions), and MonitorES handles the media player, IM and screen actions.
Simple and effective.
I do like it when things just work.
And yes, I know the Hot Corners idea is a direct lift from OSX but they wouldn’t buy me a MacBook… 🙁
The MonitorES app sounds like a god send, as it gets a pain to have to pause my media player every time i answer the phone. Ill have to give this a try, thanks.