schedules

Time can be a difficult thing to keep track of when you're at your computer listening to music or playing a game. Sometimes you don't realize how loud the audio is and whether it's disturbing the people living with you or next to you. Volume Concierge is a simple and small app that can adjust your system's audio level at set times so you don't have to worry about it. Read on to learn how to set it up.

Step 1: Download and install Volume Concierge.

Step 2: The program should run automatically after … Read more

Muzine is a music news app for iPad that lets you read the latest music topics in an easy-to-read format, or lets you customize your feeds to get news only from your favorite bands and sources. After launching the app, you're given a slideshow of featured stories--strangely, you can't go to a story by tapping on it, but instead need to hit the Features button to get access to full stories. Even with this oversite, the columned layout of the stories in the Featured section makes browsing for music news incredibly easy and enjoyable. A swipe upwards lets … Read more

Med-e-Forms specializes in PDF-based document solutions for health care providers, but it also offers a range of free Excel workbooks, including Free Excel Contact Appointment Scheduler. This free spreadsheet template for Microsoft Excel automatically schedules appointments based on your contacts list and office hours. It keeps track of contact data, referrals, and the date, time, and length of appointments. It's optimized for physicians or health care providers in small, private practices, but lots of businesses can use it, too, and even customize it to their own needs.

Opening this workbook in Excel didn't exactly dazzle us--more like daze--but … Read more

Any manager of hourly employees can tell you how difficult it is to create a schedule that takes into account both business needs and employee availability. ClockIt: Easy Schedule Creator is a powerful program for managing employee schedules and attendance. It's not the most intuitive program we've ever seen, but it has plenty of tools for creating schedules no matter how complex your needs.

We liked that ClockIt: Easy Schedule Creator starts off with a wizard, which allows users to easily set up the schedule range, employees, and shifts. Once everything is configured, the schedule is displayed in … Read more

Windows 7 automatically defragments your primary hard drive in a process that runs quietly in the background. However, if you'd like to have all new drives you plug in be defragmented as well, it's going to require a little input from you.

Step 1: Open the Disk Defragmenter from the Start menu by typing "disk defrag" in the Run box (shown below). You can always navigate to the actual program from Start by selecting All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter.

Step 2: Click the "Configure Schedule" button to open up … Read more

Enterprise deployments have never been a key market for Firefox, Mozilla's director of the browser, Asa Dotzler, has said.

Dotzler's comments were made yesterday, in response to criticism from IT managers who said the newly accelerated Firefox release schedule was causing problems for businesses trying to keep up with the rapid pace of the browser's development. Firefox 5 launched on Wednesday, just three months after the release of Firefox 4.

"We get about 2 million Firefox downloads per day from regular user types," Dotzler wrote, describing enterprise downloads as "really just a drop in … Read more

It's not always easy to keep up with the activities of everyone in the household, and traditional calendars can quickly become cluttered and hard to read when multiple people are using them to manage their schedules. Activity Scheduler 2008 is a basic program that lets users create and view calendars for multiple people or purposes. It's nothing fancy, but it might be just what you need to keep track of all your goings-on.

The program's interface is plain and easy to navigate. The bulk of it is taken up by the calendar itself, which can be viewed … Read more

TimeTable is a low-cost tool that works with iCal to help you track your hours, so you know exactly how much time you've spent on particular tasks--which can be especially handy for consultants and anyone else who tracks their time for billing purposes.

TimeTable has a simple, multipane interface that plugs right into your iCal data: You see your iCal calendars on the left, which you can select or deselect, and a list of events with date, duration, and title on the right (and you can add a dozen different columns in all, including notes and start and end … Read more

In this week's troubleshooting utility news and updates column we mentioned ProcessRenicer, a tool that allows users to change the scheduling priority of various processes, and discussed how this could be used to increase performance of some tasks. Some readers e-mailed in regarding this, wondering why not always change priority to make their programs run faster?

Unfortunately, changing the priority of a process does not mean you can tweak that process to make tasks magically faster on your system. Instead, it means that depending on your system's capabilities and uses, you might allow a task to respond more … Read more