Windows Startup and Shutdown scripts

"I think they are mostly used in a business environment and controlled by the Group Policy, but you can certainly use those on your home computer no problems.

For our work they are used for mainly mapping network drives based on who is logging into the computer, but you can use then for any number of things like installing printers, copying files, deleting files, start/stop services, etc.

A good place to find sample scripts to common problems is the Hey, Scripting Guy! blog. They have a bunch of good stuff over there."

"At work I used this method to automatically backup locally stored files to a network share by configuring a .bat script that ran the command:

xcopy ""c:\local Files\"" ""x:\local files\"" /y /d /c /l /h

At home I used a similar command to backup some files to a hard drive and a USB stick."