getting a bat file to run on startup WITHOUT login, Windows 7

[ZippyDan]

I've tried using Windows 7 Professional 64bit and following all the steps listed here

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...r/thread/d47d116e-10b9-44f0-9a30-7406c86c2fbe

Specifically those by Brian Vandemark and DEAR_Austin

I cannot get Windows Task Scheduler to run this bat file at startup to save my life. The bat file is to launch an mp3 player and play some music, but it will not play. After start up, Task Scheduler shows the Task as running, but there is no music

The bat file works fine if I run it from the desktop after loggin in (it was giving me a UAC notification when trying to launch the MP3 player, but I disabled UAC completely).

Is there a way to get Task Scheduler to work instead of being a complete POS? Or is there another way I can get this bat file to run when the computer starts?

 

[Nothinman]

I would guess that your MP3 player needs a desktop instance to interact with. You should probably look for a player that runs a service.

 

[ZippyDan]

at the moment i'm working with mplayer from the command line, although i havent retested yet (i was using Smplayer from the command line, which is kind of a GUI for mplayer - which was kind of silly since i was using the command line on a GUI for a command line program)

 

[MerlinRML]

Getting software that will run as a service is a much nicer solution, and even your task scheduler option is better than what I'm going to list below:

As an alternative you can setup the machine to autologin by modifying registry keys:
Under the registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
Create the following the REG_SZ keys:
DefaultUserName - set the value to the username to login
DefaultPassword - set the value to the password for the logged in user
AutoAdminLogon - set this to 1 to enable

Now that autologin is enabled, create an entry to run the bat file on startup:
Under registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
Create a key named whatever you want and point to path to the .bat file (i.e. c:\path\batch.bat.

It's a little bit kludgy, but it should work if you can't get any of the other nicer options to work for you.