We are creating a display system which we will be running on top of Windows 7 embedded. The computers will not have keyboard or mouse, thus will have no direct user interaction.
Since these computers will only be used during certain times we would like to define schedules for them and make them power off (including their screens), and automatically power on again at specific times.
For this, we need to be able to set the bios WakeOnRTC timer from code. It is not sufficient to wake from hibernate or sleep, as referred to at Schedule machine to wake up.
I know from others that MythBuntu can do this, but that is Linux-based. I've also heard this is easier to achieve with UEFI-bioses that are emerging.
At this point we are open to select any bios if anyone has a solution.
I'm not going to put too much because this question has already been answered, see the following links.
C#: How to wake up system which has been shutdown? http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/49798/Wake-the-PC-from-standby-or-hibernation
In short the solution revolves around the following two Win32 API functions: