It is easy to lose time surfing the internet but this can be avoided, with Task Scheduler, available with Windows XP, Vista and 7 pre-installed. Successfully utilising this tool can lead to things such as popup windows at specific times telling you “Take chicken out of the oven” or “Pick up the kids”. You will no longer have to worry about sticky notes on the screen and it’s absolutely free!
First things first you must open task scheduler, I am using Windows 7, go to Start, then type in task scheduler. It should pop up, so click on it. You see what looks a bit confusing but is actually very simple. Begin with just a simple task, so go to the right hand side of the box and click “Create Basic Task”. Another box will come up asking for the task “Name” and “Description”, fill those in with what you require and click next. Moving on you can select the frequency of this task, so for example highlight “One time” and click next. You are then asked to give the date and time you want this task to occur, so fill these in accordingly. Then you get to what you want, your task, it may not look like much of an option but this is a misconception, these 3 things can be used to do a lot of things. So select what you want, for example “Display a message” and click next. Then you can finish off your task by either writing your message, e-mail, or selecting the program. Your task should then appear in the “Task Scheduler Library”, click on it and it should be the bottom task when you scroll down. Simple.
Moving on to more complicated things, stuff happens on your computer because of different programs running, so to turn off your computer you start a program by clicking “Shut down”, this program runs and then turns off your computer! So if we were to find this program and schedule it to run with our newly found “Task Scheduler” our computer would shut down. This program happens to be “shutdown.exe”. So we can go to our Task Scheduler, go through all the stuff above, up to what task you want. From here you select “Start a program”, you move on and browse for programs and find “shutdown.exe” and so have a scheduled shut down of your PC or Laptop.
So, if you knew all the locations of all the little programs on your computer, then you could use that and make a schedule for everything. It is easy to get these locations, with Google. Just type in what you want and up it comes.
Task Scheduler is one of the most useful things I have come across on Windows and with practice can be used for so many things, you can move on to so much more detail which I cannot explain in one article, all I can say is good luck with your newly scheduled life.