How to Create Pop-up Reminders in Windows Without Using 3rd Party Software

If you juggle dozens of tasks everyday or have the memory of a goldfish, you need reminders. Email programs like Outlook or Thunderbird have integrated calendars and a system to setup reminder and alerts for important events. Google Calendar has this too. In fact, any good calendar program allows you to add reminders. There are also many dedicated programs and web apps that helps you remember things. But in this short tutorial I will show you how to create simple message reminders using tools already present in Windows.

Windows has a powerful scheduling and automation tool that doesn’t get the attention it deserves except from virus writers. It’s called Task Scheduler, and can be used to automate anything from running programs, to sending email and displaying message reminders.

Open Task Scheduler from the Control Panel. You can also click on the Start button and search for it, which is the fastest way to open any program.

Under the Actions panel, click on Create Task.

Enter a name so that you can recognize it later among the list of tasks. Your computer is likely to have a couple of tasks already running. Google Updater is one you will find if you use any Google product like Chrome or Picasa or Google Earth.

Click on the ‘Triggers’ tab and then click on the New button. Now select how to ‘begin the task’. This can be on schedule at a particular date and time, at logon or at startup. You can also create repeating alerts or nagging alerts that show up every few minutes.

You can choose ‘On a schedule’ and set the date and time you want to get reminded. If it’s a day long event, such as a birthday, you can choose ‘At log on’ or ‘At startup’.

After you have customized your alert, move to the next section which is ‘Actions’. Under the Actions menu, select ‘Display a message’. Type a title for the message box and the content of the message. Click OK to save the task.

Here is an example of a reminder message.

When you no longer need the reminder, you can delete it, edit it or pause it from the ‘Task Scheduler Library’, under which all your tasks will be visible.

Task Scheduler can be used to do lots of different jobs. See how I use Task Scheduler to automatically create restore point in Windows.

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