The birthday one sounds like an addon, that was never part of the base install but may be added at some point.
We use no cron jobs at this time. Subscriptions moved to Watch Lists which are mailed at the time a post is made. We no longer have the automatic expiration of threads as this ended up creating more problems than solving when they were setup improperly where it would end up deleting more than what the site owner wanted. Any mass removal of threads should always have some user interaction so this is all handled through the Prune Topics area.
