Script to build system information. Guru needed :)

[Bob Alexander <bob@ngi.it>]

Slowly building my "disaster assurance" strategy on top of the file backups.

Amongst other things I want to periodically run a shell script that 
would build a file with useful information. Here it is:

lsmod
lspci
dpkg --get-selections
sudo fdisk -l /dev/hda
df
uname -a

Now the questions:

1) Other useful commands I am not thinking about ?
2) I would like to redirect the output to a file called with the 
catenation of 'uname -n'.'uname -r'.config.YYYYMMDDHHMM.txt where 
YYYYMMDDHHMM is a timestamp of the command execution time. How do I 
obtain such value ? How do I create the required backticks on my laptop 
keyboard (no separate numpad)
3) If I use cron to run this everyday, being this a laptop client, will 
the due command be executed if it's natural time has expired ?
4) What is the easiest way to keep the last N versions of such files ?

TIA,
Bob