Installing & Configuring the Cygwin Cron Service in Windows. To set up cron on Cygwin, you'll need to install two additional cygwin packages using the cygwin setup.exe: cron: Vixie's Cron cygrunsrv: NT/W2K service initiator Both programs are in the "Admin" category. Cron is the cron-daemon and Cygrunsrv is the program used to install & manage Cygwin programs as Windows services. You'll also need v