make my computer be an alarm

I live in the sticks. My driveway is a half mile long. Every weekday, a school bus drops my kids off at 3:40. Our driveway goes through some thickly forrested area where mountain lions have been seen. I like the idea of meeting the kids and coming home with them.
Does windows XP have an alarm built in? I tried poking around and didn't come up with much. I would like something that would go off every week day at, say, 3:30.
If it isn't built in, there's gotta be something that already exists to do this, right?

Here is one example of hundreds when I did a search for PC Alarm Clock on Google.
But wouldn't this be a VERY simple JAVA program to write?

And then you gotta have the vm running and taking up a few megs just for an alarm?
That looks like a commercial product. Surely there is something free available.

Originally posted by Paul Wheaton:
And then you gotta have the vm running and taking up a few megs just for an alarm?
That looks like a commercial product. Surely there is something free available.

I am sure there is something available for free.
In fact, I created an app that shutsdown/logsout/restarts a PC every day at a specific time. I am sure I could easily adapt it to play some obnoxious sound of your choice. It is written in C#, so you would need the .NET runtime. If you want me to adapt the app, let me know and I will have it for you as early as Monday.
Otherwise, I am sure you can find a free one on Google with a simple search.

Did you find one?

I end up using outlook for stuff like that since I need it running 100% of the time at work.
Here is a site my friend got stuff off of. I think he used the GigAlarm...
http://www.passtheshareware.com/c-time.htm
Eric

Hi Paul,
XP has a scheduler where you can create scheduled tasks (like a cron job on unix). You can find this under the control panel / scheduled tasks.
That said, (as one parent to another), perhaps a better way to ensure your children's safety is to have the bus driver drop them off right at your doorstep, instead of at the far end of such a long driveway.
Sincerely,
Don

Gregg, thanks for the offer of a C# app, but I would much rather run a JVM than a .net server

I haven't done anything yet ...
Eric, I don't run outlook for a variety of reasons. But I've followed your link and am looking at the goodies there ...
Don, I'm not sure how well the school bus would do coming down our driveway. In the winter, it might not be able to get back out!
I saw the scheduler thing and thought about that. I thought about the idea that monkeying with that might freak out windows. But I took the risk just now. I told it to play an MP3 at 3:30pm on weekdays. We'll see if it works. If it does, that might be better than an alarm that just beeps!

Paul, I use windows task scheduler for my alarm clock in the mornings

Set to play rock music through winamp at 8:00am. The only side effect now is that I have gotten used to loud music and can sleep through it for well over an hour. I need to find some way for my pc to physically kick me out of bed

Well, I thought I had it all set up to play music. I can get it to do it from the command line. But the scheduler says that it refuses to run winamp because no passoword is provided. Okay, so I put some password in. Now it says it's the wrong password. Well that's just goofy, because when I fired this computer up for the first time, I didn't put a password on anything! When I log in each morning, I just click on my name. No passwords anywhere.
So I spent a few minutes hollering at the computer saying rude things about Bill Gates and his mother.
Anybody have any suggestions?

Okay, I figured it out.
I just added a password to my account. Duh!
Now my account has a password and I would rather it didn't, but what can you do.
I can't help but think that a year from now I'll have the computer configured to do a few more interesting things, but logging in will take ten minutes as I type in six passwords, jiggle the box to the left and run four programs in the right sequence with the right delay between each.

Hi,
I want to play a song at 8:00 am daily except few days. But i dont want my PC to remain ON from whole night. Rather it starts/reboots at 7:55am and at 8:00 it plays a song which serves as an alarm for me, How can I do this? Does Hibernating PC solves this problem.
Bye,
Viki.

Using windows task scheduler you can config a task to wake the PC up to run it - however, it has never worked on my computer, so your mileage may vary.