Scheduled tasks in Vista

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How do I find Scheduled Tasks in Vista? There is no Scheduled tasks item in Control Panel like there used to be in XP. 

The reason I ask is that both I (on an XP machine) and my wife (on a Vista machine) use ZipBackup to do daily backups. (And I don’t at the moment want a discussion on whether that is the best backup program to use, please.) These are scheduled to run at a certain time each day and, in XP at least, when you set a scheduled backup in ZipBackup, it uses Windows scheduled tasks to do it. And if I want the backup to run at an unusual time (maybe I have uploaded a lot of photos and don’t want to wait until tomorrow’s scheduled incremental backup to back them up) I can just open Scheduled tasks in Control Panel, right click the task in question and select Run. Job done.

Is there a way I can still do that in Vista? I have Googled a bit and found this Description of the Scheduled tasks in Vista on the MS website, which includes a long list of default scheduled tasks and dire warnings to the effect of “We do not recommend that you modify or disable a scheduled task in Windows Vista. Modifying or disabling a scheduled task may cause unexpected problems” which all makes me think that these are scheduled tasks, but not as I know them, Jim.

Ian

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Ian I presume you have tried as the weblink you posted suggests “In the Start Search box, type task scheduler. Then, in the Programs list, click Task Scheduler.”

There you will see in the right hand “Actions” pane an item to “Create Task…” Have you tried that? I haven’t created any manual sched tasks in Vista so I don’t know if it works the same as XP but I’d imagine that’s about where you’d start.

FWIW anyway,
Karl

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Ian

There are a number of ways to get to Task Scheduler in Vista, but since I don’t have it and never want it I assume that the Windows 7 variant of Task Scheduler 2.0 is fairly similar.

From Windows 7 I do Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tasks -> Task Scheduler, and then you have to work out “what have they changed round now” as you note the Task Scheduler Library, with some horror. Things are quite different from XP, and you will have to spend some time working out how you can now do what you knew how to do perfectly well before!

I’ve asked a question Windows Server 2008 Task Scheduler best practice in the Windows Servers forum, and I’m hoping to get some tips there…!

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Ian

There are a number of ways to get to Task Scheduler in Vista, but since I don’t have it and never want it I assume that the Windows 7 variant of Task Scheduler 2.0 is fairly similar.

From Windows 7 I do Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tasks -> Task Scheduler, and then you have to work out “what have they changed round now” as you note the Task Scheduler Library, with some horror.  Things are quite different from XP, and you will have to spend some time working out how you can now do what you knew how to do perfectly well before!

I’ve asked a question Windows Server 2008 Task Scheduler best practice in the Windows Servers forum, and I’m hoping to get some tips there…!

Good grief – what a palaver. Yes in Vista I can go to Control Pane, then Administrative Tools, then when I try to open Task Scheduler, Vista wants me to give my permission for it to continue. Then there is a great library of tasks, but the daily backup using ZipBackup is not one of them. (I know that this is scheduled and does happen, because you can look at the USB external drive and see the backups there.) So maybe under Vista, ZipBackup no longer depends on Task Scheduler like it does in XP.

Ian

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