Is there any way to make windows turn off and on at specific times?

I want to know how I can tell my computer to turn on at say 3:00 p.m. and off at say 10:00 p.m. Is there any way I can do this without the bios? If I can't turn the entire computer off, can I at least turn Windows Media Player off? I have WMP9 and I would like to be able to have it play for a certain amount of time or until a certain amount of time. Is there any way I can do that??

Most Windows versions have a task scheduler which does exactly that. If not: there is cron from cygwin which can do the same but is harder to configure.
You'd then run a script which whould shut down the PC. WSH (Windows Scripting Host) should be able to do it for example.

I can tell you how to shut it down on a schedule, but not how to turn it on... to shut down open notepad and type (without quotes) "shutdown -s" and name the file sutdown.bat. Put that file somewhere where you know where it is. Go to scheduled tasks and set it up for that bat file to run when you want the machine to shutdown.

Check your BIOS for power options. Some will have options to turn on the computer at specified times which, when combined with nikhsub1's batch file, should automate turning on and off the computer.

JigPu