Scrpting ?, may have messed up

I've been wanting to get a windows script program for a while and I do confess I did not research it. Googled for "windows script" and found the download for it and other at $MS's download page. Went through the validation routine and downloaded and installed 5.6 and whatever else it contained. Supposedly istalled fine. Rebooted when it said.

Maybe I expected something else.. like a program to write script... but nothing. No new icons, can't even see what it did do.. but then I'm not sure where to look either.

Did I ***** up and install some MS stuff I really do not need... and creat more security issues?

All I really want to do is write a specific backup routine to execute upon shutdown for critical files. This is different than normal "backup ". I simply want to copy files to a backup fat32 drive (installed)... so that if this XP gets killed for some reason... I can simply install the old fat32 drive into my old win98 machine and use them. I lost a bunch of stuff on the last crash that killed the NTFS formated drive... has to backup to a fat32 so it is usable in older systems around here.

I've been doing it manually, but rather set it up to do it automatically.

Thanks,
Dave

 

Yes

that is exactly what I did.

The windows script 5.6 seemed to install... but nothing is in the programs listing nor any icons... I (maybe mistakenly) thought it was an executable script writing program.

I also downloaded the documentation file... but it errors out with unable to display page in IE... no Idea why... as I almost never use it. I use Seamonkey as default. When I downloaded this it I saved it to a user defined (me) directory... only way to it is through windows explorer.. so must have messed that up too somehow.

I tend to organize my drives the way I want them... not necessarily windows defaults.

Does this help?

 

More

I guess I somewhat expected a program/window something like VBA progs development are...

Should of asked first, but then if the documentation file would work I may have been able to answer my questions there... but it doesn't.

 

dem45133--You read the downloaded Documentation (.chm) file, by right clicking on it|Properties|Unblock|Apply|OK. Then click on the .chm file again.

 

Scripting is a text based programming language. You can create a script using any text editor, you just have to know the language. What you downloaded is the engine it runs on. Without it, windows wouldn't know what to do with the script. I know next to nothing about writing scripts so I can't help you there but if you are using XP Pro it's easy enough to get the script to run at shutdown.

Once you've created a script, to run it at shutdown using Pro (my guess is that home would require a registry edit) , click start>run and type gpedit.msc. Go to computer configuration>windows settings and then under that click on scripts startup/shutdown. Then click on shutdown in the right pane and add the script there.

Sorry I can't help with the scripting thing but I thought I'd post this in case you figured it out.

 

Thanks to all of you

I wondered later if it was just the engines.

Will be researching.

Later, Dave

 

Dave,

Zander's got it... you just use Notepad or other text editor, type your script and save the file with the proper extension. To run the script you can just double-click the file or set it up in a batch file. The help file (.chm) that you downloaded has a ton of information for 'scripting'. Here are a couple of websites that may give you some more information:
Scriptmob.com and
VB Script Tools - Bill James MVP.

B

 

?????

The security genie in me just got real nervious. I've been trying to make this machine reasonably secure (at least as best as I can)... now your saying that since I downloaded and installed these script engines... that can be run from any text based file...

Whoa.... not so sure I want to do this or not. I typically do not allow java or Direct X to operate unless it tells me first (well supposedly, when I can anyway)... sounds like I just openned up this machine to more vulnerabilities.

Did I?

Dave

 

Don't worry about it. XP comes with it. If you didn't have it before, you would have found out in a hurry.