Remind-Me-Please is a freeware reminder program which will give you advance warning of upcoming events, appointments, TV programs, movies, birthdays and so on. Enter one-off or repeating events: daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and specials like 'Every two weeks from 1/1/2005' or 'Third Sunday of each month'.
I use this program to remind me about bills. I've got it set up so my phone bill repeats every 2 months and gives me 7 days of warnings before it falls due. Same with utility bills, car registration, insurance, etc, etc. Once it's set up properly it'll give you a splash screen listing all upcoming events whenever you reboot your computer, followed by a splash screen for items due NOW.
As an added bonus, this program will also run in a networked environment. You can allocate a username to each machine and point each one to a central shared database. Anyone can then enter 'SHARED' events (e.g. Family outings, company meetings) which will show up on everyone else's screen. Private reminders will only show on the PC which they were entered on. I know you can do some of this stuff on Outlook, but my program isn't a resource hog.
Remind me please will run in the System tray, and optionally plays a WAV file when events occur.
Make a backup of your events data before playing with Beta versions. Beta versions are the ones I'm running myself, and I don't release them unless they're working fine on my own PC. However, the risk is all yours.

The license of this software is Freeware, you can free download and free use this desktop reminder software.