I realized lately that one thing I do every day before I leave the office is to ensure that my iPod has been sync’d recently.  It’s a major bummer to get into the car only to realize that the latest “The Guild” or “Totally Rad Show” is sitting on my computer and completely inaccessible during the long drive home.

I decided to create a scheduled task which will sync my iPod around 3:50 PM, so it’ll be ready to go when I am.  These instructions were made on a Windows XP box, the same thing applies on Vista but the steps to do it will be slightly different.  Here’s how you do it:

1. Go to your Control Panel, Scheduled Tasks, then click on Add Scheduled Task.
   
2. Click Next, then Browse.
   
3. Type this into the Open File dialog box and hit enter:
   %windir%\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe
4. Name the task “Sync iPod” or something like that, choose an interval (such as daily) and hit Next.
    
5. Choose a time of day for the task to execute, and hit Next.
6. Supply your credentials so that the task can run even when you are not logged in but your PC is on.
7. Check the box labelled “Open Advaned Properties” and then Finish.
8. Click in the Run field and hit the End key.  You should see “powershell.exe” then your cursor.  Hit the space bar, then paste in the following text, all on one line:

   -noprofile -command &{ write-host ‘Synchronizing iPod’; (New-Object -ComObject iTunes.application).UpdateIPod(); write-host ‘Sync complete!’; start-sleep 5 }

9. Finally, click Ok. 

Now, assuming your iPod was already plugged in and iTunes is running, your iPod is not syncing at the moment.  If it is, wait till its finished so that you can test the task.  If you didn’t forsee the above, go ahead and do that; we’ll all wait for you.

And we’re back.  Now simply go the Scheduled Tasks control panel applet again, right-click on the new task and choose Run.  Within a few moments you should see that iTunes has started synchronizing.  If it does not work for you, please leave a comment and hopefully we can figure it out.