Sometimes you forget to do things. We all do it; but as long as you remember to remind yourself, in some way, to do it then you usually won't forget. It's exactly the same with PC's. We can tell them do things on a regular basis - or even just as a one off. We call this scheduling a task. It can be anything from running an anti-virus scanner at a certain time every day or just opening an excel document reminding you to fill in a time sheet. In this article I'm going to run through how to do it on Windows XP. It shouldn't take long.

You don't need to be administrator on XP to do this. It may be different on Vista.

Let's cut straight to the action. Start by clicking the start button, then "All Programs", "Accessories", "System Tools" and finally "Schedule Tasks".

Once you've done that, you will be presented with a screen very similar to this:

As you can see, I have 4 tasks scheduled at the moment; including notepad which I've just created for this tutorial. Let's take a look at it. Double click to open or Right Click -> New -> Scheduled Task in the white space to create a new task.

Click the image to enlarge it and see all 3 tabs contents at once. Let's run through what's in each tab.

• Task:
  On this tab you can set what program will run at the later specified time. You can use the "Browse..." function to find it and the "Start in" box will be filled in upon selection as well as your user account password(See below).
  
  Lower down you can see "Run as:". This needs to be your username and will be filled in for you when you create a new task.
  
  Click the Set password button and type in your user-account password. I have found that, for some reason, tasks will not execute if you account does not have a password - meaning you have nothing to put in the password box.
• Schedule:
  I think the name of this tab explains a lot. If not - it allows you to set the time, date and how often it will execute.
• Settings:
  In this tab you can change many little settings that affect the task.

And that's it. How easy was that. In future, I'll write up in more detail a little trick you can combine with this.

I hope this article has helped you. Browse through Daily Tip for plenty of other interesting articles.