The Case of the Spooky PC

Here's a Halloween-type mystery. Maybe you can solve it. Why would you find your PC turned on even when you know you put it into hibernate mode the evening before? Not a trick question—I'm no somnambulist—this is a real-life mystery.

Ready for the answer? It's all about the Scheduled Task option in Windows XP and about the vendors who take the liberty of telling it to schedule tasks for you. (My husband gets the credit for solving the mystery and gets to remain my support technician for eternity.)

The problem came from installing the new Kodak EasyShare All-in-One Printer as part of a review. The printer has been back at Kodak for some time now, but it left a souvenir behind: a scheduled task to run in the middle of the night and an option clicked in the task scheduler that says "wake the computer to run this task." And so it did. The task appears to perform some sort of "maintenance." I've got a call into Kodak to hear its side of the story.

When I checked my other machine I found that Apple's QuickTime automatically scheduled time to check things out and download new versions of the software, too. It didn't check the "wake computer up" option, though. My guess is that many of you have automated programs in your scheduler without knowing it.

What can you do to check your scheduled tasks? From the Control Panel selected Scheduled Tasks and double click. You'll see any programs that you (or the vendor) have decided you should run periodically. (The are good scheduled tasks. Backup comes to mind.)

Once you're in the scheduled task, click on the Settings tab. If the choice "wake the computer up to start this task" is checked, you, too, may solve your own Case of the Spooky PC.