Adventures in Windows 7 #Whatever: That Blasted Task Scheduler

After all this time, I still haven't managed to get my now-aging Windows 7 system the way I want it. I despise when a company tells me I have to do certain things at certain times every month, week, day, hour. I've never used Task Scheduler before and damned if they'll ever make me use it!

Of course, when I try to go through the hundred tasks Windows tries to run by default and remove ot turn them off, sonething gets screwed. Does anyone really need a dozen tasks running constantly, trying to report everything you do to Microsoft in the name of "helping them improve Windows?"

And I don't have my system on for more than a few carefully selected hours at a time, let alone at 2 AM in the morning so they can run a Disk Defrag. I'll run a Defrag when I want to, and not using your piss poor version. So I try to remove the defrag task from the Scheduler, but then get an error message from the Defrag program, and ever after get error messages all over the Scheduler. To be safe, I completely restore the system to try again, this time unsetting the scheduling from inside the Defrag program first. Which, of course, gives me error messages all over the Scheduler.

*Sigh*

Avast! Thanks for Not Letting Me Use Your Software...

Realizing I haven't scanned for malware in way too long, I set out to update the seven malware programs on my system. Yes, I know they all complain about each other but they can just suck it up since no one of them is good enough to be The One.


Updating from within Avast! proved impossible (remnants of two versions back!, connection kept unconnecting and and killing unresumable loooong downloads!). So I uninstalled the program. Ahhh, cathartic deleting! Except a certain component refused to be deleted no matter what, not even in Safe Mode or with Avast!'s deletion tool. Yes, they actually made a separate program to delete their stuff... and it still didn't work.

I then downloaded the 160 MB plus newest version of , scanned with the other six scanners, and installed it. Opened it to tweak the settings and, among other things, checked the option to not allow malware to close the program, closed the program. I hate a slow startup full of programs I don't want running all the time so I opened up msconfig to remove the program from starting up automatically. I then opened up services.msc to change the Avast services from Automatic to Disabled. This is how I usually leave things so that once in a blue moon I can go into Services, set it to Manual and run the program once before Disabling in again.

All my settings set, I restart, go to Services to set Avast! to Manual so I can update to the latest malware definitions and run the program once. Denied! The option in Avast! I turned on to keep malware from closing the program now isn;t allowing me to turn the program on. What a conundrum! What maroons! I uninstalled the program once more and deleted the whole mess. Except, of course, for that one last component that refuses to get off my system. Thanks a lot Avast! And no thanks anymore.