Windows Me Annoyances

Automating Scripts with Scheduled Tasks

The Scheduled Tasks feature is fairly simple, allowing you to schedule any program or—more importantly in the context of this chapter—any script.

What’s nice about the Scheduled Tasks feature is that it’s actually a technology that is somewhat well integrated into the operating system. For example, there are a few tools (the Maintenance Wizard, for one) that automate the creation of scheduled tasks to complete various automated functions, such as running Scandisk once a day.

The Scheduled Tasks feature also has its pitfalls. The logging option is limited and only tells you if a given task was started. It can be hard to tell whether a scheduled task has actually been performed successfully, unless you specifically implement logging in a script. Also, any scheduled tasks will not be performed if you’ve selected the Stop Using Task Scheduler option, if your computer is turned off, if Windows isn’t running, or if your portable computer is running off its battery. These may be obvious, but they can be easy to forget, and Windows won’t tell you if you missed any tasks. Lastly, the only way to get rid of the useless Task Scheduler icon in the system tray is to disable the feature altogether (see Appendix A ).

To create a new scheduled task, open the Scheduled Tasks folder in Explorer or the My Computer window, and double-click Add Scheduled Task. The overly verbose wizard should then walk you through the process of creating a new task. When the ...