The forsaken world of Windows Task Scheduler | Hacker News Reader

The forsaken world of Windows Task Scheduler

ssg.dev

26 pointssedatk14 comments

I would say the user task scheduling is one of the things that linux actually does better then windows! (well, nowadays the list is a lot longer but pre windows 11 it was a few). Systemd services are really simple and quite easy to make, and just run a task like you'd expect.

Love that. Has GUI caught up with the technical capabilities though, or do we need to resort to command-line and editing configuration files to schedule a task?

There isn't a GUI that i know of, but the files are very basic text files that don't really need much of a GUI. Creating a service and setting it's timer is maybe 10 lines total. For monitoring the services and seeing how long they take and all that i'm sure there are GUIs but none i know of ottomh.

> Has GUI caught up with the technical capabilities though

on Windows ? On linux, there is crond. On Windows there was, once upon a time, a Task Scheduler in Accessories. Now it seems to be gone, though, inspecting with Autostart from Sysinternals seems to imply that there still is a Task Scheduler in E Windows 10.

Google systemd GUI and you will find many such tools.

I'm sure, but I wish there were a standard to the GUIs as much as the standard for CLI tooling.

> deleted the files. How about them apples, Task Scheduler? > Obviously, Windows wasn't going to let me go by without punishment.

Obviously! You just rent this piece of deprecated garbage, not own!

> Now, I would receive errors for tasks not existing.

And after fixing it, how do you deal with a system update that restores them? Have you found a way to monitor for a list of tasks and delete them should they ever appear again?

(this would also be helpful if you delete some app tasks that come back on app updates)

Try creating a task that tries to delete these tasks. It could be triggered on startup and periodically like once a day.

I haven’t experienced that yet, but that’s a good point. Perhaps I need to keep a script of Unregister-ScheduledTask calls like a replayable delete log.

No wonder RMMs don’t use Task Scheduler. Easier to just run scripts on a timer you control.

Excellent read

Thanks!

Yes, good article showing your experience.

Also it's good for people to realize that all of the built-in scheduled Windows tasks are itemized down the folders in this console, and some can be individually disabled if you are careful.

For people that are tweaking Windows, if you're not looking into Task Scheduler it might help.

This article really describes the user friendliness of Windows. But hey, you don't have to edit "obscure" crond files. /s

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