CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowspowershellgpodomaincontroller
Ohad Benita
Ohad Benita

Reputation: 543

How to change default scheduled task process priority in Windows

I've been checking this for a while now. We have a script that creates a scheduled task and it seems that as described in many places across the net, the task priority this process and its descendants receive is 7:BelowNormal

Now this causes many issues in our testing environment which I'd like to avoid

The question here is whether I could create a GPO to override Windows' default scheduled task priority so that all new scheduled tasks will receive priority X (X being 'Normal' in my case)

I know there's an option to set the scheduled task priority upon creation but I'd like to avoid this so every new task will have a correct default priority and not the below-normal one

Thanks in advance

Upvotes: 6

Views: 14939

Answers (4)

Bobbiz
Bobbiz

Reputation: 63

This is my idea that WORKING perfectly:

$MyTask = "YourTaskName" #Name of scheduled task 

$Task = Get-ScheduledTask -TaskName $MyTask
$TaskSettings = $Task.Settings
$OldPriority = $TaskSettings.Priority
# 0: Real Time,  1: High,  2: Above Normal,  3: Normal,  4: Below Normal,  5: Low,  7: Background
$TaskSettings.Priority = 2

Set-ScheduledTask -TaskName $MyTask -TaskPath $Task.TaskPath -Settings $TaskSettings | 
     ft -AutoSize TaskPath, TaskName, @{Name='OldPriority'; Expression = {$OldPriority}}, `
     @{Name='NewPriority'; Expression = {((Get-ScheduledTask -TaskName $MyTask).Settings).Priority}}

I have put my own task name WinSCP-Task inside the FTP-Sync folder into code and below you can see its result:

TaskPath   TaskName    OldPriority NewPriority
--------   --------    ----------- -----------
\FTP-Sync\ WinSCP-Task           7           2

The result of my Powershell code after raising the Scheduled Task Priority up

Upvotes: 1

RcINS
RcINS

Reputation: 101

Unfortunately you can't change the default priority. But you can use Set-ScheduledTask to modify a existing task.

$task = Get-ScheduledTask -TaskName '...' // Your task's name
$settings = $task.Settings
$settings.Priority = 4
// For possible values see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/taskschd/tasksettings-priority#remarks
Set-ScheduledTask -TaskName $taskName -Settings $settings

Different from Alex Portnoy's answer this preserves other settings like WakeToRun.

Upvotes: 5

msb
msb

Reputation: 4438

Another way of doing this, without using powershell:

  1. Export the task from the GUI: in the Task Scheduler, right-click the task and select "Export…" and save the exported task in a file

  2. Change the priority
    2.1 Open the file in a text editor (like Notepad). This is the XML that defines the task. Each action will have a section, which contains <Settings>, which contains a <Priority> element.
    2.2 Change the value. The default value, for “below normal”, is 7. You can use either 6, 5, or 4 for “normal” priority. You will not usually want to go above “normal”. 6 will probably work for you.
    2.3 Save the file (for example, "c:\mytask.xml")

  3. Import the task using command line/schtasks:
    schtasks /DELETE /tn "\TASKSCHEDULER-FOLDER-PATH\TASK-IMPORT-NAME" (you need to first remove the existing task, to create a new one from the command line using schtasks)
    schtasks /create /xml "c:\mytask.xml" /tn "\TASKSCHEDULER-FOLDER-PATH\TASK-IMPORT-NAME"

I had 220 machines to do that, so I did it this way. Since all machines had the same configuration, I could copy the same XML file to all machines and recreate the scheduled task based on the XML. See a little more details on the different priorities here. This answer was based on this article.

Upvotes: 6

Alex Portnoy
Alex Portnoy

Reputation: 476

You can edit your existing task by adding the settings option

$currentTask = Get-ScheduledTask -TaskName $taskName 
$settings = New-ScheduledTaskSettingsSet
$settings.Priority = 4
Set-ScheduledTask -TaskName $taskName -Trigger $currentTask.Triggers -Action $currentTask.Actions -Settings $settings -User "user" -Password "pass"

Upvotes: 5

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