How do I schedule a program to run on my machine periodically?

The Linux readers are all shouting “cron!” at their computers. Windows has something similar, of course. And it’s very, very flexible.

Just fairly well hidden.

In Control Panel, Scheduled Tasks, fire up the Add Scheduled Task wizard. It will then allow you to specific the program to run (either from it’s list, or by browsing for the program file yourself), and then define how often and/or when the program is to be run.

I actually recommend using a batch file to wrap your program, that redirects and logs all output:

foo.exe >log.txt 2>&1

This will log any problems that Windows might have finding, or starting, the program. The program can, of course, be another batch file that runs a series of commands.

The most common problem encountered is permissions relating to the account the scheduled tasks run as. Once you’ve created your scheduled task, you can select it’s properties, and then specify that they run as a particular account, if you like.

Scheduled tasks are exceptionally handy. In fact, each of my machines has a scheduled task that runs in the middle of the night that takes care of backing up all my data, as well as a number of other administrative tasks.