Scheduled Tasks

[Guest]

I have set scheduled tasks in Windows Defender and confirmed that they are
set in Scheduled Tasks in Control Panel. The problem is the Time does not
stay set in Scheduled Tasks. I have been scheduleing Computers to come on
after hours and run a full system scan, but the time for the scheduled task
on the computer keeps changing and is no longer in sync with the time the
computer comes on. Any suggestions.
jt

 

[Bill Sanderson]

I don't know what would cause this--but you could simply not schedule using
the mechanism inside Windows Defender, but schedule manually yourself.

 

[Guest]

I had this happening to me as well. What I'm doing now is leaving a single
day set in Defender (so I can leave the automatic update function switched
on), and scheduling the other days in the task scheduler. It seems to work.

I did find that when I keep fiddling up and back with the settings, that's
when some of them disappear. I'd suggest to set the one day in defender
first, then add the others, and see what happens.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

The same command-line executable has switches to trigger an update--so you
can schedule both functions yourself. Just run \program files\windows
defender\mpcmdrun.exe at a command prompt to see the possible switches to
control what it does.

Updates are:

\program files\windows defender\mpcmdrun SignatureUpdate

I'm unclear about whether, or how, this app returns any success or failure
messages. Typically they might be returned as an errorlevel, but I haven't
tested this--maybe Vista code is more advanced. On my system, with no
updates available, it seems to return errorlevel 0, which doesn't tell me
anything useful.

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