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Mini How-To: How to make your PC go to silent standby (S3 mode)

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f0dder:
I reckon battery lifetime stories will change depending on who you ask, there's probably both money as well as religion involved.

A thing I can say about the topic, though, is that after a couple of years of almost exclusively connected-to-socket operation, my mum's laptop would last less than 15 minutes om battery. And some months back, it would no longer power on, until I removed the battery.

So, personally, once I scrape money together for a laptop, I will be running it off battery, and only connect it to socket when battery is near drained.

Local Cooling was already mentioned here at DC... doesn't do anything fairly useful. Apart from making money.

oldfart:
Sorry to get out of line F0dder.  I'm new and haven't read all the posts yet.  I don't remember when the energy star power settings were added to Windows [98?] but every review I read for several years all said to shut off the power options in Windows because they would do nothing but mess up your system.  I happened to stumble upon Local Cooling, the program was free and it worked so I was pleased with it.  I didn't look at it as a money making scheme because they haven't gotten a dime from me and I haven't been back to their web site since I installed the program a couple of months ago. 

f0dder:
oldfart: well, many many years ago, power management was pretty buggy - including the stuff that needed to be done at BIOS level, not just Windows. So I guess it made sense as a general advice back then. For the last several years, things have generally worked pretty well though, as long as you're on Windows and have proper drivers.

So no reason to run LocalCooling unless you like the stats and want to help them make money :)

johnfdeluca:
So does anyone know of an app that allows me to schedule standby and resume schedule?  I ask b/c I have a computer in the other room with a wireless card (so no wake up on lan) that I'd like to not keep running all the time.  Ideally, I if I can put it on a schedule, I can access it remotely during certain hours without keeping it on all the time.
-johnfdeluca (January 26, 2008, 08:46 PM)
--- End quote ---

Here's the answer I came up with:
1.  The resume operation is as simple as Adding a scheduled task (via control panel).  It really doesn't matter what it launches...the key is I just set it up for daily @ 6PM and ensure the "Wake this computer to run this task" under the settings Tab - Power Management section is checked.

2.  The suspend operation is a bit trickier since Windows doesn't come with a pre-installed method to suspend (shutdown....yes but suspend...no).  So a small utility via sysinternals to the rescue:  PsShutdown.  This utility accessible via microsoft technet http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/miscellaneous/psshutdown.mspx supports the standby with the switch -d.  So assuming you place PsShutdown in your C root directory, you simply add a task to run "C:\PsShutdown.exe -d".  I set this up to run daily at midnight which then places the machine in suspend/standby each night.

The net is:  A machine which wakes up at 6PM each night and then goes to sleep at midnight each night.  Since the machine is not wired to the network, but rather wireless, I can't opt for a more elegant solution of using Wake on LAN features of a wired ethernet connection and a power management settings which place it to sleep after a period of inactivity.

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