Thinkpads Forum

When I am on the road I want to have sound disabled. When I am at home, I want to have sound enabled. Currently I have always to switch sound on and off on my thinkpad. If I have set sound off via the thinkpad keyboard, I can not turn it on having my thinkpad in docking sation with my desktop keyboard. What can I do? Is there a way to tell my thinkpad to turn off sound when on the road? I use vista. Or if this is not possible, then how can I activate sound with my desktop keyboard and mouse when the thinkpad is in docking station? Thanks!

The easiest way is use the Volume/Sound Off key along the top of your keyboard (icon of speaker with a line through it).

RealBlackStuff wrote:The easiest way is use the Volume/Sound Off key along the top of your keyboard (icon of speaker with a line through it).

That does not work with my T60 Vista + Advanced Docking station. My standard cherry desktop keyboard has sound keys, but they do not turn sound on when sound is deactivated by the thinkpad keys. It seems that the thinkpad sound keys turn off the sound on a hardware basis. How do you work this out on your systems?

Yes, volume buttons in T60 and previous ThinkPads are controlled by BIOS and thus work independently of the operating system. T61 was the first to include a "software" buttons that just inform the operating system that they were pressed and let it handle it how it wants to. Both solutions have advantages and disadvantages but this behavior cannot be changed. That's why an external keyboard cannot unmute a T60 that was muted using its "mute" button.

But to the problem. I'm sure it can be done, there's just no software that I know that does it yet. Things would be much simpler if you had XP because there is a piece of Python code on thinkwiki.org (BTW, I wrote it) that controls various ThinkPad specific things including volume and mute. You would just have to install Python and write a two lines script that would mute/unmute when run. Maybe it could even be made to execute when you dock/undock so things would be fully automatic.

But you have Vista so this Python code won't work. This is because it depends on the Hotkey driver and Vista has a Lenovo System Interface Driver instead. These provide similar services but have a slightly different API. It can be done thou. For example, I made a small tool to control the ThinkLight which works on both XP and Vista. It detects the OS during runtime and chooses the API accordingly. Here's more about it:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=70226

I know, none of this really helps you but I post it since it's relevant.

If I will find some free time, I'll try to figure it out (how to programmatically mute/unmute a T60 on Vista).