SPS 2003 Alerts

My company is using SPS2003 and I have been told that alerts never really worked properly before. So I started to investigate. I found this article http://wss.collutions.com/Lists/FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=198

All the accounts had the correct permissions so I started to check the indexing schedules. I found that who ever setup SPS prior to my arrival had set the "Task interval" to 15 minutes and the "Task duration" to only 20 minutes.

The problem here is the Task duration isn't referring to the amount of time for the task to complete. But for how long during the day (in my case) the task will run.

For example if you want the incremental indexing to run every 15 minutes between the hours of 9am to 5pm then these are the settings you should have:
Schedule type: Daily
Starting time; 9:00 AM
Repeat task: yes
Task interval: 15
Task duration: 480
Schedule interval: 1

To get to the page where you can set these settings:
Portal home page > Site Settings > Search Settings and Indexed Content > Configure search and indexing > Manage search schedules
You then need to select the relevant search schedule and check the settings.

I hope this helps out someone out there.