reducing power bill, ... Smartpower ...

[notso99]

nPVR is awesome, had it installed and percolating for 2 months.

I am interested in reducing power consumption. I fall in the camp that think hibernate/shutdown is OK. I followed several nPVR threads about hibernate/shutdown and was lead to Smartpower. If my light research holds true then I can query nPVR database and prepare Smartpower schedule rules. How do you manually wake up PC outside of Smartpower schedule?

Is Smartpower as useful for managing my nPVR PC on/off as it reads?

[martint123]

I have been using Windows powersaving since day 1 (for me) with gbpvr and onwards and have only used the MCE standby tool with XP and W7.
My only problem is with a Hauppauge nova-t-500 PCI board (although it is USB on-board) that seems to fail around once a month when coming out of hibernate. A reboot fixes it. On another machine it is fine - I suspect possibly a via chipset problem on the main pvr machine.

[imilne]

Yep, I don't use anything other than Windows 7's built in power management stuff (although that's not to say I haven't resorted to firing up the MCE standby tool in the past).

Basically:
- set an idle timeout in Windows to either sleep or hibernate based on your usage. I use 5 minutes.
- NPVR will not allow Windows to sleep if a recording is active so you don't have to be using the machine in person
- when the recording is finished, Windows will put the machine to sleep after the idle timeout
- if wakeups are enabled (check bios/motherboard/windows settings) then NPVR will auto-wakeup again for recordings

Iain