A customer once had a ???virus??? on their
machine. The only problem is that the virus didn??™t show up with Task List, none of the virus checkers
could find it, and it didn??™t have any of the usual virus symptoms. The virus simply showed up at what
appeared at first random intervals. After many hours of searching, I discovered that the user had added
a buggy script to Task Scheduler. The buggy script was the virus of my nightmares. My client ended up
paying for quite a few hours worth of consulting time to have me remove the buggy script from Task
Scheduler. My actual repair time, once I located the problem, was less than 5 minutes.
204 CHAPTER 8
PERFORMING TASK AUTOMATION
Scheduling and Managing Tasks
The Task Scheduler consists of multiple elements. The Task Scheduler application is actually a
Windows service. Because Task Scheduler is a service, it??™s always present in the background so it
can run applications automatically for you. You use the
SC
command described in the ???Controlling
Services with the
SC
Command??? section of Chapter 3 to configure the Task Scheduler.
As a safety precaution, it??™s a good idea to set the service to manual and manually start it as
needed.
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