Task Scheduler - Power Management

alex_boothby

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Hi Guys,

I hope you can help.

I work for a business that has about 100 computers. To save money I want to set something up so that certain computers will shut down at 6pm, some at 5pm and so on if not touched for a certain amount of time.

The company who looks after our computers says they will do this for £20 a month, which is a bit steep, considering most people turn them off manually!

On a home computer I would just use task scheduler to set it up. However, will this work on work computers as with some computers multiple users use the same machine. So if I was to set up the task while user A was logged on, would the rule carry over when user B logged on?

I'm happy to attended each computer, but worried it will revert.

my boss has told our computer company to allow me admin rights.

Any help or ideas would be very much appreciated! Or if any more info required please let me know.

---------- Post added at 12:27 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:27 PM ----------

Wooohoooo 300th post! :D
 
I'm sure this can be done, but you'll have to use either a domain account with the appropriate permissions, or perhaps a with a local account you create on the PCs.

People have used the built in SYSTEM account to schedule tasks. It's bad practice and windows will prevent/make very difficult to do this. You can however schedule tasks with the LocalService account, but it has very little privileges and I'm not sure it would be able to execute a shutdown.
 
we used to do something like this at a place I used to work.

we implemented a website where users could shutdown their PCs and start then (using magic packets) meaning they could turn their PC off, go home, realise a solution to a problem and connect in and progress stuff.

when I was at university the library and computer labs would shut at 10pm.
at 9:50 a message would pop up saying this computer will shutdown in 10 minutes, please save your work, and the timer counts down.

to do that you need a management box, you keep a list of computers and go through sending shutdown \\name -i [message] -t [time]

You can look at command parameters to figure out how to use it.

it's a bit all or nothing though, you don't really get to see what's being used you;re just electing to turn off everything...


probably the best way to implement this power saving without just shutting down computers when people are working is to use the power settings option and make the computer either hibernate, sleep or shut down after either 1 or 2 hours of inactivity.

I think that you can set this through GPO also, (though I've not looked so I can't tell you where off the top of my head.)
 
when I was at university the library and computer labs would shut at 10pm.
to do that you need a management box, you keep a list of computers and go through sending shutdown \\name -i [message] -t [time]
Agreed. I like the idea of doing this centrally on one box. That's only a couple scheduled tasks that you can run with a domain account and easily manage. Maybe creating a user account for this and putting it in Backup Operators. I believe that group has the ability to stop/start machines. Of course this assumes you're working in a domain environment but I would assume you are.
 
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