The new Event Viewer in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 has been totally re-designed and now offers enhanced administrative capabilities.  One of the features of the new Event Viewer is the ability to easily assign custom tasks to events that are logged to any one of the logs.  You can initiate an action based on the result of the log entry.

Open Computer Management by right-clicking the Computer icon on the start menu (or on the Desktop if you have it enabled) and select Manage. Navigate to the Event Viewer.  You can also open the Event Viewer by typing Event Viewer in the Search box and pressing Enter, or typing eventvwr.msc in the Run command.

In the console tree, navigate to and select an event log.  Please Note :  You cannot assign a task to an event in a saved log.

Right-click the event and select Attach Task to This Event, or highlight an event and go to the menu on the right hand side and select Attach Task to This Event.

In the Create Basic Task wizard, type a name and description, then click Next.

In the When a Specific Event is Logged windows click Next.

In the Action window you can select any of the following 3 options (you can change the action later, and even add more actions to the same event):

Start a program – Such as a batch file, an Anti-Virus scanner or other.

Send an e-mail – To yourself or anyone else, and you can also specify the name or IP of the mail server.

Display a message – A pop-up message on the machine’s screen.

In the Summary window click Finish.

Changing the properties of the custom task

Changing the properties of the custom task might be useful when you need to change any setting assigned for the task, such as the type of Event ID, action, schedule or other settings.

To change the properties of the custom task:

In Task Scheduler > Task Scheduler Library > Event Viewer Tasks right-click the custom task, or press the Properties command on the right pane.

In the Actions tab note that you can change, remove, or add the custom action to perform when the event is logged.
In the Triggers tab you can change many settings, including when the task should not run, when it should expire and other settings.

Tags | General, Windows Vista