Windows – Toggling enabled/disabled on specific triggers in a task in the task scheduler using powershell (or something else)

powershelltask-schedulerwindowswindows-server-2008-r2

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There are lots of ways to interface with Task Scheduler. For example, you can use the Schedule.Service COM object.

$TaskScheduler = New-Object -COMObject Schedule.Service
$TaskScheduler.Connect()
$TaskFolder = $TaskScheduler.GetFolder("\") # If your task is in the root "folder"
$Task = $TaskFolder.GetTask("The Name Of Your Task")
$Triggers = $Task.Definition.Triggers
$FirstTrigger = $Triggers.Item(1)

Those trigger objects each have an Enabled property. I think the array indices here start at 1, which is weird, but whatever.

Edit: And oh yeah, the RegisterTaskDefinition() method should save your changes.

Related Solutions

Windows Server 2008 R2 – Process Runs Slower as a Scheduled Task

It appears that there is more than just "regular" process priority at work here. As I noted in the question, the task scheduler by default runs your task at lower than normal priority. This question on StackOverflow describes how to fix any task to run at Normal priority, but the fix still leaves one thing slightly different: memory priority. Memory priority was a new feature for Windows Vista, and is described in this Technet article. You can see memory priority using Process Explorer, which is a must-have tool for any administrator or programmer.

Anyway, even with the scheduled task priority fix, the memory priority of your task is set to 4, which is one notch below the normal setting of 5. When I manually boosted the memory priority of my task up to 5, the performance was on par with running the process interactively.

For info on boosting the priority, see my answer to a related StackOverflow question about IO priority; setting memory priority is done similarly, via NtSetInformationProcess, with PROCESS_INFORMATION_CLASS set to ProcessMemoryPriority (the value of this is 39 or 0x27). I might make a free utility that can be used to set this, if others need it and don't have access to programmer tools.

EDIT: I've gone ahead and written a free utility for querying and setting the memory priority of a task, available here. The download contains both source code and a compiled binary.

PowerShell script not completing what it should do when scheduled with Windows Task Scheduler

You need to Set-ExecutionPolicy so that the account running the scheduled task is allowed to execute PowerShell scripts:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope LocalMachine Unrestricted

As per the help file for Set-ExecutionPolicy, a scope of LocalMachine sets the policy for all users of that computer. As opposed to if you just Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted from your own user account, it only sets that policy for your own user account. Furthermore, there are also separate policies for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of PowerShell.

And if Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope LocalMachine Unrestricted is too much of a security compromise to you, you could set it just for that one user by logging in as that user and doing it, or executing a process under that user's security context and setting the policy for that user.

Oh, and well, this probably doesn't need to be said, but we can't know if the user you've assigned to this scheduled task has the permissions necessary to delete stuff from those UNC paths.

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Related Solutions

Windows Server 2008 R2 – Process Runs Slower as a Scheduled Task

PowerShell script not completing what it should do when scheduled with Windows Task Scheduler

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