Trouble Scheduling Browser Window to Open

I tried to use PowerShell to launch a website every weekday… but it’s not working as I expected. What am I missing?

$trigger = New-JobTrigger -Weekly -DaysOfWeek Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday -At "9:30 AM"
Register-ScheduledJob -Name LaunchSite -Trigger $trigger -ScriptBlock {start iexplore URL}

Nothing seems to happen, but when I do a Get-Job it says that the status is “Completed”.

I’d like it to open in the full-screen version of IE… but for now I’d settle for it working at all.

This is in PS4 on Win 8.1.

Looks like the Register-ScheduledJob creates scheduled tasks which run in the background (and has no option to specify otherwise.) You’ll have to modify the scheduled task after Register-ScheduledJob is finished:

$trigger = New-JobTrigger -Weekly -DaysOfWeek Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday -At "9:30 AM"
Register-ScheduledJob -Name LaunchSite -Trigger $trigger -ScriptBlock { start iexplore URL }

$principal = New-ScheduledTaskPrincipal -LogonType Interactive -UserId $env:USERDOMAIN\$env:USERNAME
Set-ScheduledTask -TaskName LaunchSite -TaskPath Microsoft\Windows\PowerShell\ScheduledJobs -Principal $principal

This changes the task’s options to “Run only when user is logged on”, causing whatever programs it runs to show up on your interactive desktop.

Edit: On a side note, the ScheduledTasks module is only avaialble in Windows 8 and later (which you have.) If you wanted this to work on older operating systems, you’d have to find a different way to modify the task. schtasks.exe /change /IT can do it, but unfortunately requires you to provide a password for the task as well. There may be other methods using WMI or the Win32 API, but I haven’t looked into that since you mentioned Windows 8.1 anyway.

I added the two lines you mentioned to make it a non-background task and made sure it was scheduled properly.

At 9:30a as scheduled, a window appeared - then abruptly closed before it had a chance to load the site even… It was just kind of a dark blue window - probably a browser as specified in the script.

Any other ideas for how to make the window persist long enough for me to interact with it and close it on my own? :slight_smile:

I saw basically the same thing when I tested that code. The dark window you mentioned is the PowerShell console, but it doesn’t have to stay open very long, because all it’s doing is loading up your scheduled job scriptblock and invoking it. I’m not sure if it would be any help to try to leave that PowerShell window open, as it is just being launched with these parameters:

-NoLogo -NonInteractive -WindowStyle Hidden -Command "Import-Module PSScheduledJob; $jobDef = [Microsoft.PowerShell.ScheduledJob.ScheduledJobDefinition]::LoadFromStore('
LaunchSite', 'C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\PowerShell\ScheduledJobs'); $jobDef.Run()"

Ahh… Well, the point is that the browser window didn’t launch and remain open as intended. :confused:

Maybe it’s ok for the code to execute in the background without being visible at all - as long as the browser window is visible and remains that way.

Those two things are tied together. If powershell.exe launches in the background, so does IE.

I’m not sure why the browser isn’t opening for you; that part worked fine for me. I tested the code before I posted it here. The only thing I changed was URL to http://www.google.com

Just a follow-up. I pasted the code from your reply (#17968) and now it’s working fine.

When I get a chance I need to figure out how my attempt to follow your lead resulted in a different output from when I cut and pasted your code. :confused: