nnCron

If you're on the hunt for a sophisticated scheduling and automation management tool, nnCron is worth considering. nnCron offers all of the traditional scheduling features such as starting programs, opening documents at specific times and displaying reminder messages. However, it also offers a range of additional features that are less common in similar programs. These include the ability to start any program as a service, run tasks as though they were started by a specified user, handle and restart missed tasks and reminders, as well as shut down, hibernate or put your computer to sleep at a specified time.

Furthermore, nnCron can "wake up" your computer in order to run a task and can display/hide/close/kill/minimize/maximize as well as hide specified windows to your system tray. You can also display messages on your screen and write them to a log file, work with your clipboard, files and registry, emulate keyboard input and mouse activities, dial and hang up, use the system speaker to make beeps of specified length and frequency, play audio files, sync system time, assign a specified priority to a process, terminate any running process and restart automatically after fatal errors.

You can even use nnCron as a system event monitor, keeping track of files, flags, windows, processes, mouse activities, periods of idle time, keyboard shortcuts, getting online/offline, insertion of a disk in a drive, presence of a host on the network (ping), amount of free space on a disk, and more. nnCron also understands cron table format (Unix) and is managed with easy-to-edit text crontab files.

But if you're uncomfortable working in this framework, nnCron offers a graphical shell which can be used to remove, add, edit and run tasks, set up reminders and adjust program settings. In addition, nnCron has its own powerful (Forth-compatible) scripting language, allows you to use VBScript/JScript and regular expressions, and can be extended further with plugins. nnCron can also be started as a system service or as a regular standalone application. Overall, nnCron is a powerful and flexible program suited to those who require advanced automation and scheduling functionality.