Back in the day I used AppleScript on my Quadra 950 to do whatever stupid tasks I felt like having it do. On Windows, however, I'm not familiar with anything that's widely used to do things like this. The closest I've found is relating to Visual Basic, but I'm not sure that's what I want (or maybe it is).
For example:
Shut my PC off at night, leave GF's PC on, drink my tea and pass out
At 4am, GF's PC sends a magic packet that turns on my system
Upon completing the boot process, script runs that goes to a podcast website, checks for an update, downloads one if found, and then goes onto Facebook to log me in and copy all the new status updates from friends before emailing them.
This is an extremely broad example and in particular might not be exactly feasible without some heavy coding, but I've seen it done...but I don't know how. What are my options for doing operations like this in Windows?
Linux has cron, but I'm not on Linux, I'm on Vista x64. If I need to purchase some software I will (edu discounts FTW) so I'm open to some options.
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