Automatically open any app at a designated time on Windows

In this tutorial, we will be listing the steps to make Windows OS automatically open apps at a specific time. There might be instances where you would be using the same app or software every day on your PC. For example, being a blogger, I have to launch the Chrome browser every day as soon as I boot up my laptop. To make this process completely automated, I have made Windows do this job for me. As soon as the designated time comes, the OS automatically opens the said browser. Well, you too could easily do the same. And it isn’t just restricted to Chrome.

You could make Windows automatically open any app at a specified point in time. This routine could be repeated daily, weekly, monthly or at your custom time. It has been made possible thanks to the Windows Task Scheduler program. Interested in knowing how it all works out? Well then, here are the required steps to create your own routine. For this tutorial, we will be assigning Chrome to the scheduler. But the steps will be the same for all the other apps as well.

Automatically open Apps at a specific time on Windows

Launch the Start menu and search for Task Scheduler. Make sure to run it as an administrator.
From the right-hand side Action menu, click on Create Task.
You’ll now be taken to the General tab. Give this task a name and a short description (optional).
Next up, go to the Triggers section and click on New. Then from the New Trigger dialog box, select the Start Date, Time and the frequency of this task i.e. one time, daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
To further customize it, head over to the Advanced section. There you could make this action to trigger itself at more than one point in time. For example, you could make the OS launch Chrome at 9 in the morning and 5 in the morning.

With this, we conclude the first half of the guide on how to automatically make Windows launch an application at a preset time. Let us now allocate an app to this scheduler. Likewise, don’t forget to check out our guide on how to schedule automatic shutdown on a Windows PC

Assigning app to the Task Scheduler

Once you have specified the desired time period and duration for the task, click OK and head over to the Actions tab. First off, leave the Action menu in its default state (i.e. it should be set to “Start a program“).
In the Program/script field, click on Browse and navigate to the .exe file of the desired application. For Chrome, the default location will be C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application. Hit OK and proceed ahead.
Now you could leave the Condition tab and move over to the Setting section. Therein have a look at the last option. It allows you to customize the automatic launching of an application by Windows. It talks about what action the task scheduler needs to take if the said task is already running. Suppose you have manually launched Chrome before the scheduled time assigned to the scheduler to do the same task. In that case, you will have to tell the scheduler what action does it needs to take.
- Should it open Chrome in parallel? You will then have two instances of Chrome running on your PC.
- Or should it pause the launch event this time (or every time Chrome is already opened)?
- Should it queue the event at this instance? This would make it launch Chrome as and when you close the browser that you have opened earlier.
- If none of these works out, you could tell the scheduler to even kill the existing task.

Also Read: How to create an automatic system restore point daily on Windows 10

Once you have made your decision, hit OK. This will create your new task. You could see it in the scheduler’s home page. If at any point in time, you want to delete this task, head over to the Action menu and select the Delete option. This will remove the said task for good.

With that, we conclude this guide on how to make Windows automatically open any app at a preset time. Do let us know what do you think of this handy tip, in the comments section below.