New Inspirons - VNC, turning off the screen and waking up from sleep mode (questions)

Hey guys... Got a few questions, please bare with me.

So I got my new 1720 last week. I got Vista Home Premium and I got it set up with Real VNC Enterprise Edition - http://www.realvnc.com/ - I got a couple questions.

First off... I leave my PC turned on overnight, although from now on I will set it up to turn on automatically in the morning so that it'll be available for me to access from work (that way I don't have to turn it on in the morning when I'm in a hurry, which is almost every day). I can do that through the BIOS options right? Does Vista have an app that will let me set it to hibernate, sleep and turn back on on a schedule?

Also, when I leave it turned on, I close the lid so that the screen doesn't turn on, to save power (on the advanced power options, I set it to not do anything when I close the lid, obviously). I wonder though, does the screen turn itself on when I access it using VNC from work even though the lid is closed? I bet that's not possible, but I haven't tried it with just my USB mouse at home.

And is there a way for me to turn it on from work using VNC (or some other way), if I leave it hibernated or in sleep mode?

Thanks in advance.

 

I can answer a couple of your questions.

The screen shouldn't turn on if the lid is closed.

As for turning your computer on look up Wake on LAN, if you set your computer up correctly you can send your computer a packet from work, that will cause the computer to turn itself on. I don't believe it works in sleep mode, and it doesn't seem work well from hibernation, so you should keep your computer off to use Wake on LAN

 

Hey that's really helpful. Thanks... I'm on the Wake on LAN page on Wikipedia, there are clients listed there for Windows, so I guess I'll figure out which one's the best.

Does anyone know if Vista has some tool to schedule shut down events? Over the years, I've tried a couple apps that do this on XP and for some reason, they seem to work half the time. Sometimes I wanna schedule a shut down for the middle of the night if I have a couple big downloads going...

Thanks