The Scheduled Tasks tool lets you set up any program to run automatically at regular, scheduled intervals. Unfortunately, that's a trick that sounds more useful than it is; in many cases, Scheduled Tasks does little more than remind you that you need to run the application you've specified. It doesn't actually make the program do anything. You must generally type out commands to make the program do anything automatically.

To schedule a task, you double-click the Add Scheduled Task icon, which opens the Scheduled Task Wizard. The wizard walks you through the process of selecting the program that you want to, specifying how often you want to run it and when (Figure 8-19). You then specify the user account and password that you want the program to use when it runs.

Figure 8-19. Select the time of day and the day of the month you want the program you've selected to run. If the task is to run only during certain months, check that as well.

On the wizard's final page, you can check the "Open advanced properties" checkbox to enable further configuration after the wizard has scheduled the task. You get a dialog box that lets you specify command-line options (short computer-code instructions) for the program you've scheduled.

The command line capabilities of various programs vary greatly. Windows 2000's backup program (Chapter 18), for example, relies on the Scheduled Tasks tool to run its jobs, so it offers a generous collection of command-line parameters. Other programs have none at all. By examining the documentation for the program you want to schedule, you can determine whether you can fully automate the task you want to perform, and the command-line parameters you need to do it.