Reviewing scheduled task inventory for Windows Server 2008 R2
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 12:14 PM
Default installations of Windows Server 2008 R2 enumerate a number of default scheduled tasks, many of which you may not need.
For the base release of Windows Server 2008, one of my previous tips identified the default tasks that are inventoried in the Task Scheduler. The R2 release of Windows Server 2008 also has plenty of tasks that you may not want running in server configurations.
The Task Scheduler snap-in (taskschd.msc) has two features on the front page to help identify what is configured and what is actively running. Figure A shows the Task Scheduler main screen.
Figure A
Some of the scheduled tasks that may not be desirable in all situations include the following:
- Customer Experience Improvement Program: Located in the \Microsoft\Windows\Customer Experience Improvement Program, \Microsoft\Windows\Autochk, and \Microsoft\Windows\Customer Experience Improvement Program\Server paths, there are six default scheduled tasks configured to run.
- Application Experience: Two scheduled tasks are in the \Microsoft\Windows\Application Experience path and are without a description, which in my book makes them good candidates to be disabled.
- Universal Plug And Play: A scheduled task is created in the \Microsoft\Windows\UPnP path. If your server is using UPnP, it may be advisable to leave this running. The corresponding Windows service, UPnP Device Host, is already disabled.
It's a good idea to review the configuration when migrating to any new platform. While the Customer Experience Improvement Program scheduled tasks are the most frequent offender of scheduled tasks that may be acting outside of administrative control, you should decide if these tasks should be permitted to run via the default scheduled tasks.
Rick Vanover is an IT Infrastructure Manager for Alliance Data in Columbus, Ohio. Rick has years of IT experience and focuses on virtualization, Windows-based server administration, and system hardware.
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