It has always amazed me that operating systems come with card games, text editors, media players, etc… but not a simple alarm clock. So here’s a solution I came up with for users of Windows XP. Enjoy.
Step 1: Create your alarm clock “buzzer”
Open Windows Media Player and create a playlist to be played when your “alarm” goes off. Save your playlist (it should have a .wpl file extention) and remember where you saved it.
Step 2: Create your Media Player launcher batch file
For the sake of an easy example, let’s say that in step one you named your playlist “playlist.wpl” and saved it at c:\playlists\playlist.wpl, your launcher batch would be:
START wmplayer c:\playlists\playlist.wpl && EXIT
Create this file using your favorite text editor and save it with a .bat extension – something like alarm.bat would probably work well.
Step 3: Set your alarm using Scheduled Tasks
Open Windows Scheduled tasks and add a new entry: Start Menu > Control Panel (in classic view) > Scheduled Tasks > Add Scheduled Task.
This will open the “Scheduled Task Wizard”, click ‘next’ on the first screen, then ‘browse’ on the second to choose the batch file created in step two as the task to run
Once your alarm.bat batch file has been chosen as the scheduled task to run (and you’ve tested alarm.bat to make sure it launches your playlist in Windows Media Player), set the correct time and date for the task to run, how frequently you’d like your alarm to go off, and any other desired scheduled task settings (there are some important logged-on and power settings to take a look at), make sure the task is enabled, click ‘OK’ and voila! An alarm clock in Windows!
Sorry, there’s no snooze.