So for those of you still don’t yet know how I watch people’s feeds, I utilise IE8 and Windows Live Mail, since I prefer those programs over Mozilla’s offering, and Google’s lack of offline tools to do the same. However, one niggling problem with using those to update my feeds is that sometimes, they just don’t update no matter what the setting for frequency of updating. And even more annoying is that sometimes it’ll just randomly start working again…

To take an example, Friday night I was going to bed and I set my computer (main machine) to go to sleep. Getting up in the morning, I turned it back on again and went through the day not doing much, however I did not notice my feeds updating with new items despite the fact that I know some feeds ALWAYS update during the night. Sure enough none of the feeds had been updated since last night. Now this was perplexing since I have it set so that my feeds update every 15 minutes (I follow a few heavy-duty feeds, mostly involving cats and food porn). Sure enough, with a manual refresh of the feeds they would start updating every 15 minutes again.

So after it happening to me again this morning, I decided to do a bit of investigating. Checking in Scheduled Tasks, I noticed the feed updating task – User_Feed_Synchronization-{whatever} – was there, but was only set to go off once a day, which is odd as I set feeds to update way more often that that. I checked the time associate with it and it was set to trigger off after midnight TONIGHT. Nearly another full day without feed updating.

I edited the task so that after it is triggered it would repeat every hour, and thought all was fine, until I thought that I may need to set the setting in Internet Options to update every hour as well, which I did. However, I then went back to Scheduled Tasks to find that the task had been changed and set to go off in an hour. Going back and changing the update frequency also changed the time the task would trigger at. This I found to be very odd. After a manual refresh of the feeds, I went back to the task again and noticed that it had been changed so that it would trigger again in another 15 minutes. Now it was clear to me what the story was.

Now since this was only really happening with my desktop and not my laptop, since I always put that into Hibernate, rather than sleep, I went and checked it as well. Looking at the task, I can see it still has the same daily trigger as my main machine set to go off at 1am every day, but it also had a one-time trigger set to go off 15 minutes after the last update. Whether it was this one-time trigger that made it go off and update after I turned my computer back on from Hibernate, I’m not sure.

I’m not sure if it’s a fault in the way the sync program sets up the next sync in the scheduled tasks, a fault in the way the task is set to trigger, or just a fault in the fact I put my computer to sleep at night rather than having it run constantly. I do know though, that it’s fucking annoying.

• My main machine runs Windows 7 Professional RTM on 64-bit, with IE8 32-bit, and Windows Live Mail.
• My laptop runs the Windows 7 RC 32-bit, with IE8 and Windows Live Mail.

Hopefully someone in the proper know will read this and provide a better explanation and why it still does this…