Windows provides a number of valuable maintenance utilities, designed to help maintain a PC in optimal working order. The problem is that many users either can’t be bothered or, despite best intentions, don’t remember to use these on a sufficiently regular basis.
The simplest way to run a utility automatically is to put it in the Startup folder so that Windows runs it automatically whenever you switch on your PC. The trouble is that the more you exploit this feature the longer your system takes to boot up, and you’ll be inviting problems that may eventually prevent it starting up successfully at all. Moreover, it’s impracticable to run many tasks on startup, simply because of the length of time they require to run. This is where Windows’ Scheduled Tasks feature comes in.
The task scheduling engine is a service that always runs in the background. Windows uses it for taking daily System Restore points, for running performance monitoring on which information to pre-fetch and for scheduling backups that you set in the Backup calendar. Other programs can use it as well: if you’re running Norton AntiVirus and it’s set to do a weekly scan of your hard drive, that’s actually a task in Scheduled Tasks, as are the regular checks for updated virus definitions. A Wizard is provided to assist users in scheduling additional task.
This tutorial takes you through the process, step-by-step.
- Scheduling Tasks Cleanup
- Disk Defragmenting with Task Scheduler in Windows XP for Computer Maintenance
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