Creating Sleep Timer for Applications

[JagZone]

I know there's gotta be someway of doing this but I want to create something like a sleep timer on a clock radio but for applications such as WMP or IE. I use a streaming radio feed off the internet but when I go to sleep at night I want it to shut down IE after a certain period of time so the music doesn't play all night.

Anyone know about doing this.

BTW...not sure if this is right forum or not for this..sry mods

[glc]

You could probably write a simple batch file or something, and put it into Scheduled Tasks.

[JagZone]

That's what I was figuring would be the best way but I have no clue where to even start on that kind of thing

[glc]

This may help:

http://help.lockergnome.com/lofivers...hp/t33267.html

This is for a shutdown script - it will shut down your computer in an orderly fashion.

[doctorgonzo]

Create a new text file and name it something like "Alarm.bat"...it doesn't matter as long as it has a .bat extension. Open the file in Notepad and put this line in:

"C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" /prefetch:1 "http://www.npr.org/dmg/dmg.php?getProgramStream=true&NPRMediaPref=WM"

Of course, use the http link for the stream you want to listen to. Save the file and exit.

Go to Control Panel, then Scheduled Tasks, then Add a new task. Select the batch file you just created and set the time and frequency you want. That's it!

[glc]

That looks to me like it will *start* WMP, I think this person wants something to shut it OFF.

[doctorgonzo]

Ah, I see, I was reading it completely backwards.

Doing this in Windows is a lot harder than Linux, where you could use a cron job to grep the list of running processes and kill it from there. However, I found this utility called Task Kill that might do the trick. You can do the same thing with the batch file, and kill Windows Media Player at a specific time using the utility.

[jamesrpm]

Microsoft"s "Plus! Digital Media Edition" comes with a timer for WMP to shut it off and turn on. Whole package is 19.95 from Microsoft , lots of other features included too.

[JagZone]

Just wanted to follow up on this. The information Doctorgonzo posted worked perfectly. I used tskill.exe and just set it up as a scheduled task. The scheduled task line read:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\tskill.exe firefox

Because now the music is playing streaming through the webrowser. You can't put the .exe extension on though just the process name without the extension.

Then I simply set the task up to run when the computer is idle for 100 minutes. Works like a charm. Just an FYI for anyone else wanting to do this. You can even set it up to kill Windows media player by using

C:\WINDOWS\system32\tskill.exe wmplayer