Macros work during the day, but not at night as scheduled...

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Ringo
Newbie
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2006 2:01 pm
Location: Alexandria, VA

Macros work during the day, but not at night as scheduled...

Post by Ringo » Mon Jul 24, 2006 9:52 pm

I have been pulling my hair out with an issue for more than a week here. I have a software program that dials sites and downloads data for our business. That software actually has an autodownload executable, which I simply have to paste into Scheduler following the RUN PROGRAM command, type one space and enter the unique user i.d. for each site I need to dial. All of that works fine. I have about 60 or 70 sites scheduled to dial 4 minutes apart from each other, which is plenty of time between each site.

When I schedule the task to run during the day time, it seems to work fine. In fact, it has even worked a few times in the evening. However, more often than not, when I schedule it to begin with the first site at 0:01 through about 04:00, it usually does not work at all.

The energy save settings on the PC only have the monitor shutting down after 3 hours of no use, but the hard drive is never scheduled to shut down. The software does not rely on network logins/etc., as it is dialing right from that workstation through its internal modem out to the sites.

I can't figure out why it works sometimes and not other times. Particularly, why it seems to always work fine during the daytime and not after midnight, when I really want the thing running. We can tell when there has been a power failure (rarely ever) and whether that workstation fell asleep or was rebooted, etc. Last night was a perfect example of all systems fine, but the scheduled tasks never got executed. Oh yeah, the other thing we checked for was to make certain the software we were trying to run was off when we left last night. That is required for the autodownload executables to work.

I am pretty new with scheduling and the scheduler software. However, this seems to be some little bug or some oversight on my part, because when I run any of the scheduled tasks by clicking RUN NOW they work fine and they typically work when I change the time. I'm not sure if it is not recognizing 0:01 as 12:01 a.m., which is when I am looking for the scheduled tasks to begin running??? When I use military time during the day it works from 09:30 to 13:30, etc.???

Any help or ideas you could send would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Ringo Lanzetti

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JRL
Automation Wizard
Posts: 3505
Joined: Mon Jan 10, 2005 6:22 pm
Location: Iowa

Post by JRL » Mon Jul 24, 2006 10:19 pm

Try the enable logfile option. If the script runs you can view the logfile to see at what point it failed and if there is no logfile created, you know the script never ran.

Is it possible to disable the screen saver and sleep mode for a few nights to see if everything works. Then after you make sure there are no outside influences like phone lines being busy, you can work on having the computer respond from the screen saver.

Let us know,
Dick

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