The standard approach in computer-controlled systems is to sample and control periodically. In certain applications, such as networked control systems orenergy-constrained systems, it could be advantageous to instead use event-based control schemes. Aperiodic event-based control of first-order stochastic systems has been investigated in previous work. In any real implementation, however, it is necessary to have a well-defined minimum inter-event time. In this paper, we explore two such sporadic control schemes for first-order linear stochastic systems and compare the achievable performance to both periodic and aperiodic control. The results show that sporadic control can give better performance than periodic control in terms of both reduced process state variance and reduced control action frequency. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.