Disk Defrag Scheduled Using Another Program' title='Disk Defrag Scheduled Using Another Program' />Hi Experts, I have been working on Defragmnting the hard drive remotely to Windows XP Pro workstations, and so far I am able to schedule it on the local. In this EasyToFollow tutorial I will show you how easy it is to use the Disk Defragmenter. Using Task Scheduler to Run Processes Later. In this edition of Geek School, were going to teach you about the extremely powerful Task Scheduler utility that Windows uses behind the scenes to do all sorts of things. You might be thinking that the Task Scheduler is just a way to schedule an application to run at a certain time, but it is so much more than that, and has become an integral part of Windows. In the old days, Windows had a ton of Services running in the background at all times just to do things like trigger system cleanup events or maintenance that had to run at a particular time. Modern versions of Windows abandoned this practice as much as possible, and instead just added events to the Task Scheduler so that they would do the same thing, but without requiring a running process and wasting memory all of the time. This doesnt mean that Windows has no services running, of course, because many things need to stay running all the time in the background, both because they require constant activity and to communicate with other processes. But the migration of system tasks to the Task Scheduler has been a great thing for PC users. Understanding the Task Scheduler Interface. When you first open the Task Scheduler application, youll see three panes of information the left hand pane with a list of folders in a tree format that is used to organize the list of scheduled tasks, the middle pane that displays the tasks themselves, and the Actions pane on the right that gives you quick access to common menu items. Dont be intimidated by all of the things in the interface it is really quite simple and there arent as many options at the cluttered interface make it seem that there are. Windows Me Repair Programs. The right hand pane can actually be disabled using the right most icon on the toolbar, as all of the actions are also available in the Action menu. Auslogics-Disk-Defrag.png' alt='Disk Defrag Scheduled Using Another Program' title='Disk Defrag Scheduled Using Another Program' />If you have a task selected from the list, the menu will change to a task specific set of items like Run or End, but when you first open Task Scheduler or dont have a task selected, youll see the options to create tasks, display running tasks, and all the rest. Well explain how to create tasks in a minute, but first we should go through some of the options in the list and explain what they do. Create Basic Task gives you a wizard interface for creating scheduled tasks. Create Task uses the full detail view where you can manually create a task with any option you want. Import Task lets you import tasks that you have previously exported. Very useful for copying a configuration to a secondary PC, or adding a task back after reinstalling. Display All Running Tasks shows a list of all the tasks that are currently running as well as what folder you can find that task in. Enable Disable All Tasks History turns on detailed logging for everything that Task Scheduler does. New Folder creates a new folder in the left hand pane, mostly useful for organizing a bunch of scheduled tasks, should you ever need to do that. Delete Folder deletes the folder that you made and realize you didnt need in the first place. Refresh and Help should be self explanatory. The Display All Running Tasks option pops up a really simple list that shows which tasks are currently running, although it never seems to populate the Started or Run Duration columns. In any case, its handy to see if things are running. The Enable Disable All Tasks History option is really useful because it enables the History tab and tracks almost everything that happens. If you are troubleshooting a problem that involves a Scheduled Task, you should enable this option to get more data to work with just make sure to disable it again afterwards, because that is a lot of unnecessary logging that might slightly degrade performance if you dont need it. Well go into great detail shortly about the details of the rest of the task detail tabs, but it is worth looking through many of the folders to see the types of things that are being run with a scheduled task by Windows or third party software. For instance, if you head down into the Microsoft Windows Defrag folder, youll see the Scheduled. Defrag task in the list. The actions tab shows you what is actually being run behind the scenes, and you can check out what the rest of the options are set to. Note we wouldnt recommend messing around with the options for built in Microsoft services. Consider it informational only. Another fun example is the Microsoft Windows Application. Data folder, which has the Cleanup. Temporary. State task. Looking at the Actions tab tells us the actual command line, which uses the rundll. Windows. Storage. Application. Data. Cleanup. Temporary. State function within that DLL. What does this mean You can feel free to look it all up for yourself, but essentially all. NET applications provide the ability to use the Application. Data functions to create temporary files or data that are only for the current session. So Windows calls the Cleanup. Temporary. State function every so often to clear out those temporary files, which are also located in the regular Windows Temp folders. Since you are already wondering, you dont need to manually trigger this task to keep your PC clean if you want to clear out those temporary files, just use Disk Cleanup or something like CCleaner. But its fun to learn a little more about how Windows works under the hood. I have been working on a vbs script silent disk cleanup. I cant get it completely silent. I have a good silent defrag script that work. Windows. Speed of analysis on fragmented files Isnt it speed we want from our computer Speed of defrag Some extras such as scheduled defrag, shutdown PC when done, etc. Solved Windows 10 100 disk usage in task manager, disk usage running extraordinarily high at the rate of 100, also fix system using 100 disk usage error. SAUYtYEDuE/UJKY-UEczCI/AAAAAAAAEKQ/koEfZBN19a8/s1600/Auslogics+Disk+Defrag+Pro+4.2.0.0.jpg' alt='Disk Defrag Scheduled Using Another Program' title='Disk Defrag Scheduled Using Another Program' />Speaking of Disk Cleanup, did you know that Windows will automatically run it in silent mode whenever you are really low on disk space The command line for this scheduled task shows how it is done by passing the autoclean and D systemdrive arguments to cleanmgr. Windows tells Disk Cleanup to automatically run and to clean the drive that Windows is installed on. Youll notice with some of these built in tasks that the Trigger might not be set. That could be for a variety of reasons, including that Windows might trigger the scheduled task a different way. Creating Basic Tasks with the Wizard. Now that weve gone through some of the options in the interface, the only thing remaining is to understand how to create tasks. The Basic Tasks wizard helps you quickly create a task without needing to understand everything about the interface. Itll prompt you for a Trigger, which is what Windows uses to decide when to run the task. The trigger could be a time or date, whether daily, weekly, monthly, or just every other Tuesday at 1. PM. The options are very powerful once you select one and head to the next screen. You can also choose to launch a task when the computer starts, when you log on, or even when a specific event shows up in the Event Viewer, which well be covering in the next lesson. Once you get through the Trigger settings, youll be prompted for the Action that you want to perform, which is just a way of saying that you will use this screen to start a program. You can still select to send an email or display a message, but chances are good that the feature will be removed in a future version, since they both show up as deprecated now. On the next screen youll be prompted for a program or script, and you can add arguments to that script as well. The last option for Start in is really useful if your application or script is looking for a file in the current folder, so you can set the current folder to where the file is. Thats all there really is to it for creating a task using the wizard, but that is just the rookie way to do things.