It has been very long since I last posted on my Blog. In the company, I hardly get any time to use the internet for my own purpose. The little free time that I get is spent on checking e-mails or watching videos on Channel9. Two weeks back, I got a BSNL broadband connection at home. After making sure that all “necessary” internet tools like Anti Virus, Firewall and Anti Spyware are up and running, I ventured into making the best usage of the internet connection.

My internet plan is Home 500 and it is free between 2:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. (Yippee!) You know what that means? Yes, lots of downloads without ever worrying about the meter ticking. This has a downside though; 2:00 a.m. is a little late even for me. If I make it up to 2:00 a.m. then waking up before 8:00 a.m. would be very annoying. So, the problem is “How do I schedule all downloads to automatically start at 2:00 a.m. and stop before 8:00 p.m.?” After some searching on Google, I found out a simple solution. By the way, I use Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2.

Here are those helpful commands:

In the above command, “<entry>” is the name that you see when you connect to the internet. This appears under Start > Connect To. In my case, it is “dataone”.

Now, I fired up the Windows Task Scheduler. I wonder that how many of you really use this feature on your home computers? Anyway, I added the following new scheduled tasks:

1. Automatically connect at 2:15 a.m.
2. Start Kazaa Lite at 2:20 a.m.
3. Automatically disconnect at 7:45 p.m.
4. Shutdown at 7:50 p.m.

With 15 minutes of buffer, since some time now, I have been switching on my computer and modem at around 12:30 a.m. and having a good night sleep.

One more thing – while adding new scheduled tasks in Windows Task Scheduler, I received an “Access is denied” error. More searching on Google revealed that if your default windows login does not have a password then you cannot schedule tasks on Windows XP SP2. So, I also had to create a password for my windows user account.