Automatic restart PC and Shot down

[enkgok]

Cheers all,

I am animation artist. I have an art show coming up. I want my PC to start automatically at certain time and shot down at certain time and start my animation/video and shot down my animation. Without any human interaction. (Call it idiot proof from art director) Is this possible. I have tried to find things online. No Luck… I was thinking DOS scripts. Or where should I look for answers…

[ArkNinja]

I am pretty sure that you cannot start your computer without any interaction, because it is powered down and cannot run any applications. You could easily open the animation and close it, but I foresee problems with it being maximized or it being played (check in your flash player or whatever for options like 'Always Start Fullscreen'). I personally would do this with C++ simply because it is my language of choice. I would do something along the lines of this:

#include <iostream>
#include <windows.h>

int main()
{
    std::system("C:\\Program Files\\Adobe\\Flash Player\\flashplayer.exe C:\\path\\to\\flash\\file");
    Sleep(however long the animation is plus 20 seconds for loading time);
    killprocess("flashplayer.exe"); // There are many functions for this, look around
    std::system("shutdown"); // you could also just shutdown without killing the process
}

I think something like that would work.

[Netshroud]

Some BIOS'es offer a time to automatically startup the computer. Alternatively, you could run a script on another computer that send a Wake-On-Lan packet to the system.

[VaKo]

As long as its a modern PC with modern power features you can use windows scheduling to power up the machine and run a task.

[ArkNinja]

Hmm, I did not know that, does the program just run off of the microprocessor that runs off the CMOS battery or what?

[VaKo]

Its more to do with ACPI sleep states, where a computer is not actually off, ever.