Scheduled Task not running at scheduled time

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Windows 10

I have a task scheduled  for 2 AM every day. It wakes the computer from sleep and then runs a script. The computer then goes back to sleep. This process has been running fine for several years.

Recently, on occasion, the task does not run at the scheduled time. Because I have the task set to run as soon as possible if the scheduled start is missed, it runs shortly after I log on in the morning. It only does this every now and then. The first time this happened was in May, and  then not again until sometime in July. Now it has become more frequent – like once or twice a week.

Has anyone come across this situation?

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I haven’t experienced this myself but I’ve read about it often enough. The cause, if I remember correctly, is thought to be file and/or registry corruption and the advice is to delete and recreate the scheduled task.

To add to that, I would suggest running sfc /scannow from an elevated console just to check the integrity of anything related to Task Scheduler.

The locations for scheduled tasks:

C:\Windows\System32\Tasks
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Schedule\Taskcache\Tasks
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Schedule\Taskcache\Tree

Hope this helps…

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Thanks for the suggestions, Rick.

I’ll try creating a new task, and see if that helps. It certainly seems like a reasonable thing to try, and it’s easy, too. Since this only happens occasionally, it might take some time to realize if this takes care of the problem.

I did do sfc /scannow and didn’t see anything related to scheduled tasks.

 

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Just a follow-up, in case anyone is interested…

Before May 2, the scheduled task would kick off at 2:00 AM every time. Beginning May 2, it would sometimes kick off at 2:00 (33 times), usually it would kick off a few minutes late (125 times), and sometimes not at all (19).

Looking back at my records, this problem began on May 2. It might just be a coincidence, but on May 1, three April updates were applied (KB5012599, KB5012117, KB4023057).

I find it hard to ignore that coincidence, but I’m not sure what I can do about it.

I don’t think the problem is a Task Scheduler problem, but rather something with the OS or hardware that initiates the “wake up”. The reason I say this is because Event Viewer shows that the computer doesn’t wake up at the scheduled time. On the days that the task didn’t run, the computer did not wake up at all (at the wake up time).

My suspicion is that there is some threshold where if it is “too” late, then whatever was supposed to awaken the computer just gets ignored.

Unfortunately, while this seems to shed some light on what is happening, it doesn’t solve anything.

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