How to make Windows 7 task pause when user logs onto computer

No, I haven't had her do a manual scan. Reason being, she needs the computer all day/evening long during the week and on and off during the weekends and there's never enough computer down time for the scan to finish without interferring with her work. I scheduled the scan to start on a day when she is off the computer for the longest time but it is still not enough time for the scan to complete.

In task scheduler there is the conditions tab option, where it will only start the scan if the computer has been idle for a length of time and stop the scan when the idle condition stops and then restart it again when the idle condition exists again but I don't want it to stop the scan and restart the scan from the beginning, which is what I think this option does. If anyone knows whether or not this option is actually just stopping the scan and restarting it where it left off, please let me know.

Thanks,
Veronica

Readers Always Welcome!

15 hours for any scan is way out of line. I suspect something else is running during that period that's causing a severe system load. I'm not familiar with Norton but the specs indicate that it has a "Smart Scheduler". Have you checked to make sure it's not running two scans?

As far as Windows Task Scheduler, you can stop a task if it runs longer than X (hours, days, etc) but you can't make it resume from that point. You can also stop a task if the PC comes off idle state.

If Norton has a scanner with parameters (I assume it does if you're using WTS), one suggestion would be to break the scan into different tasks. Say system files on one day each week and libraries/files the next day.

Thanks, I'll check for other things running at the same time. I scheduled her backup program to run on different days and I disabled all the other tasks that Norton 360 runs, like disk optimization but I didn't check Windows defrag, etc. now that you mention other running tasks.

Any info on how to set it up to run system files one day and programs files another would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

VMP said:

Any info on how to set it up to run system files one day and programs files another would be greatly appreciated.

Yeah, I'm not familiar with Norton. Does it have scan parameters that can be entered in say, batch mode? How did you setup the scan in Task Scheduler?

I followed directions on another link I found and set it up to run the file navw32.exe with the /L argument. I don't know what that argument means.

Thanks for that link. That may explain why the scan is taking so long, it is scanning her whole computer plus the external iomega drive where her system image is saved. Those external drives takes forever to scan. I'm going to change the task to scan just the c: and d: drives.

Thanks!!!
Veronica

Let us know how it turns out.