Simple Timer, Call external program,

I've taken a few questions that have me stumped and put them into one thread.

1) I'm looking to make a simple timer for a program I'm writing: The program displays a character string next to a count down timer that refreshes, say, every 5 seconds. When the timer reaches 0, it displays an alarm saying so.

I'm pretty new to C++ and don't know really how to read functions from header files.

2) How would I call an external program, like notepad.exe, from C++? (You'd think searching Google would produce answers but strangely, it didn't give me anything useful.)

3) There was something else, but I can't remember ATM, I'll edit my post when I can remember.

Read the FAQ, all your answers are in there.

Duh, I knew that, I was testing you see! :P

(In reality, I missed the FAQ on the main page and was looking through the message board's FAQ.)