For the first time I now have the opportunity to have a desktop PC at home in a room where it's possible to leave it running all the time, so this opens up a few possibilities of things I can do.

It's running Windows Vista Business - As much as I'd like to rip that out and install CentOS Linux on it, it's my wife's work PC so that's not going to work!

Firstly, I assume there's no standard way to get a machine to swtich on at (say) 8am and off again at 10pm?

The most obvious thing to set up first is Remote Desktop, I guess that depends on my router setup mostly..

I'd also like to use it to do forum backups. Now in Linux I'd use cron and rsync, no idea if Windows has equivalents of these?

I assume there's quite a few more interesting things I could do