Using the Windows Vista Task Scheduler

If you’ve used Scheduled Tasks in Windows XP, you’ll be pleased by the changes in Windows Vista. To begin with, the user interface to the task scheduler has been implemented as a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in, giving you access to more information about the properties, status, and run history of your tasks (and those that the operating system and your applications have established for you). Second, the Scheduled Tasks snap-in has been neatly integrated with the Event Viewer snap-in, making it easy for you to use events (an application crash or a disk-full error, for example) as triggers for tasks. Third and most important, the Windows Vista Task Scheduler supports a much more extensive set of triggering and scheduling options. Now, in addition to running programs or scripts at specified times, you can launch actions when the computer has been idle for a specified time period, when particular users log on or off, and so on. You can use these (and other) triggers to send e-mail messages or display message windows, as well as to run programs or scripts.