Vista’s Task Scheduler

Last week I was working with an OEM who had two applications: a main application and a scheduler. The sole purpose of the latter was to start the main application. Now the good thing obviously was that the customer did not want to overburden the CPU with the main application during the logon process. A polite gesture for both end-users and other applications that want to be first. However, one could ask why not use the built-in Task Scheduler?

The answer is that on XP the scheduler did not have enough flexibility for a delay. On Vista it does. You can specify all kinds of events (logon, startup, even your events that are logged in the event log). And from there you can specify the delay.

You can schedule tasks programmatically with a COM object model or you can use schtasks.exe to batch script it. No more need for custom schedulers.