Wednesday, November 10, 2010

FREE Windows Timer Application to replace SteadyState Timer

So I have worked with a library that currently uses SteadyState. As we were getting ready to migrate to Windows 7 and new computers we found out that the compatability was non existant. So we couldn't use steadystate. Than just recently Microsoft came out to state that they were going to end support for steadystate eventually anyways.

You can still download SteadyState till the 31st of December after which no more. You can read that announcement here. Also they released some documents which help you to duplicate many of the features of SteadyState, which Keith Comb's covers in one of his blog posts here. I recommend reading the blog post and snagging all three documents.

One of the things you discover though is that the timed log-off/shutdown/restart functionality just isn't there. You could use a script to log them off but then the user never know's how much time they have before reboot or log off. So I went ahead and wrote a little program to duplicate this behavior.

It allows you to set whether you want when the time ends to restart,logoff, or shutdown. It will display a bubble in the bottom right corner counting down the time. You may have different times for different user. Also their is no installer just the exe, the readme, and a example registry value. I recommend putting a key in the registry under the run value for windows. Seems to work great. If you have any questions please contact me at mortythe2 @ gmail . com no spaces. Or leave comments here.

Download Here