How to Schedule Ketarin Update with Windows Task Scheduler

Transcription

1 Scenario: Like most households, I have a bandwidth hungry family. If my son isn t playing Madden or Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 on his Xbox online, my wife is streaming Netflix, video chatting with friends and relatives back home, or listening to music online. And of course, we all have phones connected to the wireless. We are on a lower tier Internet service because.well, reasons. Whenever I want to update my GEGeek Toolkit programs, it hogs every bit of bandwidth we have, and invariably, the wife and son are both yelling, What are you doing?! The Internet is lagging! Since I leave my computer on overnight, I thought the best bet would be to schedule a Ketarin update in the wee hours of the morning so as not to offend the rest of the household. I looked around online and conferred with GEGeek himself and came up with this idea on how to do it. My Setup: Briefly, I want to explain how I have my GEGeek Toolkit set up on my computer. I have the GEGeek_Toolkit folder extracted to a spare hard drive in my system (F:\). You may have a different setup, and if so, modify the following instructions to suit the layout of your GEGeek. How To: For the sake of this demonstration, I have the GEGeek_Toolkit folder on the C:\ drive. It looks like this: The first thing you have to do is set up Ketarin to update automatically when it is run. This is accomplished by double clicking the GEGeek_Toolkit folder and double clicking Ketarin.exe, as shown below.

2 Once you ve gotten Ketarin open, you want to click on File up in the upper left corner, and select Settings. Alternatively, you can hold down the Ctrl button and tap the letter T. Once you bring up the Settings, make sure there s a check (1) in the box next to Update automatically at startup. Maybe put a check in the box next to Avoid beta versions of FileHippo if you don t want beta software in your toolkit. Make any other changes, then (2) click OK.

3 For this next part, you will have to use Task Scheduler in order to schedule the Ketarin to update overnight. The easiest way to get to that is to hit the Windows key to bring up the Start Menu. In the Search Programs and Files text box, type task without the quotes, and wait for it to bring up the Task Scheduler. With Task Scheduler now open, you will want to create a basic task, so click on that option (on the right hand side under Action) as shown below.

4 This will bring up the Create Basic Task Wizard. Up first, you will want to (1) give your task a descriptive name, (2) give a brief description of what the task is doing, and then (3) click next.

5 Now you ll want to decide how often you want to update the programs. That s entirely up to you. If, like me, you leave your computer running overnight, you can conceivably have the task run every night. Keep in mind, it will take at least 20 minutes for everything to download (your mileage may vary depending on your Internet speed). I set mine to run daily, and then in the next screen, I set it to run every 3 days (at 3:30am). Below is my Daily screen after selecting daily (which is the default) on the Task Trigger screen. You will want to (1) set the time of day for the task to run, (2) recur every X number of days, and (3) click Next. For the Action, you will want to select Start a program (default selection) and click Next. Here s where it gets interesting. On the Start a Program dialog, you ll want to (1) Browse to wherever your GEGeek_Toolkit folder is located (in my example, it s on the C:\ drive), and (2) double click on Ketarin.exe.

6

7 In the Add arguments (optional), you will want to include the following (without quotes) /database=c:\gegeek_toolkit\gegeek_apps /notify /silent. Also, make sure you edit the part after the database= part to reflect where your GEGeek_Toolkit folder is located. This ensures that the database of programs gets loaded when Ketarin starts. Otherwise, you will get no updates. The completed Start a Program box is shown below. Click Next to proceed to the next screen. At the next screen, it shows you an overview of your task. Look it over, make sure everything looks correct. Go back, if you need to change something. Once everything looks good, click Finish. [Note, you may want to select the check box next to Open the properties dialog to set it up further. If you don t stay logged in, you will want to select Run whether user is logged in or not. I keep my computer logged in at night, so again your mileage may vary. You may, at this point, want to Run (right click the Ketarin Update task and select Run) the task just to check whether it works. It should show up in the Task Pane down in the lower right corner by the clock that it s updating. It will show failed updates as well as ones that succeed, much like when you update manually using the Run Ketarin Update batch file. Once completed, the task should show Operation completed successfully. (0x0) in the Last Run Result column of Task Scheduler.