How to schedule scans on a computer that sleeps?

What is the recommended approach to scheduling a weekly scan on a computer that sleeps?

Is there a way to start your scan from the Windows Task Scheduler so that you can have it wake up to run it?

Or has anyone got a good setup for scheduling a dummy task in Windows Task Scheduler that runs, say, 1 minute before the Eset Scheduled Task is set (has anyone even tried this to see if it works? If so, what do you do for the "dummy" task?)


Thanks!
Abby

 

I created a very simple program using Visual Basic that I called IEFBR14 (a reference to an IBM do nothing program). All my program does is exit.

Then any time a program has a schedule (either Disk Defrag, Anti virus scan or whatever) I add a task in Wondows Scheduker to run IEFBR15 5 minutes before the real task is set to go.

Peter

 

Peter,

Hah, thanks - I had the same idea and wrote a program DummyTask.exe (gotta love IBM naming conventions ;-) ). I had 2 things I wanted to run at night, so I scheduled the 1st for 2:00am, the 2nd for 3:00am. I then scheduled 2 tasks - 1 to run at 1:59am, the 2nd at 2:59am.

But then, bizarrely, when I came to check on it this morning, my computer was awake (even though the last task finished over 4 hours ago and it's supposed to sleep after 1 hour idle).

I'm not sure why it's still up - and actually the eset scan I noticed took 1.5 hours, which was longer than I expected (I figured eset would safely complete before the computer hit 1 hour "idle"). So now I'm wondering:
- Will the computer stay awake while eset runs? Or might it fall asleep in the middle (I'm assuming that last night something ELSE was keeping the computer awake since it's still up 4 hours later)
- Any idea how I can troubleshoot what prevented my computer from going to sleep?

It occurs to me that I recently enabled Wake On LAN on one of my NICs. But I definitely wasn't pinging it in the wee hours of the morning. I wonder if something else kept it up... bah.


Thanks!
Abby