What’s New in Task Scheduler for Windows 8 & Server 2012

Hello AskPerf! This is going to be a quick blog post to alert you to some of the changes in Windows 8 and Server 2012 as it relates to Task Scheduler. Most of these changes are a welcome addition like using PowerShell to manage Task Scheduler. There were however, some features removed that could affect you in your environment. Those include the following:

Features Deprecated

  • Action: sendEmail
  • Action: showMessage
  • AT.exe cmdline utility

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Workarounds

For the “Send an e-mail” action, you can use the PowerShell “Send-MailMessage” cmdlet in its place.

For the “Display a message” action, you can use the built-in msg.exe command line tool. Help file output below:

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Since the “AT” command has been deprecated, you can use schtasks.exe instead. If you need a command prompt launched as the Local System account, you can use “PSEXEC.EXE -s“. Psexec.exe is part of the PsTools, and can be downloaded here.

For more information on what else has been changed since Windows Vista, check out the following MSDN article:

What’s New in Task Scheduler

For more information on the schtasks.exe command, check out the following AskPerf Blog:

Two Minute Drill: The Schtasks command

-AskPerf Blog team