Simple XP tip: Alarm clock
1 October 2007, by Ben
I’ve come to quite like XP. But there’s the odd missing feature, like the fact that Windows has no alarm clock. I don’t mean a super-fancy Outlook Calender application, where you have wade through scads of GUI just to get a reminder sound — I mean a simple beep-beep alarm clock.
Then I discovered that XP (especially XP Pro) has a reasonably rich set of command line utilities. Well, not rich if you’re used to Unix-like shutils or txtutils, but rich if you’re from a Windows 95, “the most powerful command is dir /w” type of background.
So of course I wanted my alarm clock. No doubt old news for Unix-heads, but enter the Microsoft version of the at command. (Or the more powerful schtasks, but I think that’s only in XP Pro.)
To get my alarm clock, I first made a batch file which just plays a sound, and stuck it in my path, say, c:\windows. Here’s my alarm.bat that plays an alarm sound using Media Player (put it all on one line):
"c:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\mplayer2.exe" /play /close /new c:\windows\Media\notify.wav
And then when you want to set an alarm, just go to the command line (Start > Run > “cmd”) and type something like:
at 7:30pm alarm
Or, if you want an alarm at 6am every Mon, Wed, and Thu:
at 6am /every:m,w,th alarm
Trivial, I know. But what I like is that you don’t have to download yet another 1.5MB program to do it (like this one or this one).
2 comments (oldest first)
Thanks very much for the tip. BTW, I found I had to make the .bat extension explicit and use a 24-hour clock:
at 19:30 alarm.bat
nice tip, i threw my last alarm clock out the window on accident.