Fails to wakeup to update epg

[garyeuph]

I changed my sleep settings last night from 'suspend' to 'hibernate' and amazingly gbpvr woke up and ran updateepg.dat and I have the fully updated xml file also.

So, it looks like the computer responds differently to being put into a hibernate state than a suspend state (but why would it do this purely for the episode guide update - recordings have worked in either suspend or hibernate)

If anyone has an answer for this I would appreciate it as the response is much quicker from suspend than hibernate - but at least I have a working solution now

Gary

[stefan]

Sorry, can't help you on that one. I only use hibernate.

[garyeuph]

Thanks for all the help anyway Stefan - I have certainly got to grips more with what is happening 'under the hood'. Hopefully someone else may have spotted this issue before.

Gary

[ricklous]

Maybe theres some conflict between your BIOS settings and XP?

for suspend to work correctly, the two have to be married up pretty much exactly. For example, my bios is set to force s3 standby (fans off), but without a registry hack XP attempts S1 standby (fans on) and never gets there and i have to do a reset. I know this isnt what you are seeing but it might be worth seeing if you do have both set to be using the same mode. it'll discount one more possible-but-highly-unlikely element if nothing else.

[stefan]

That is a very valid point =)

[ricklous]

That is a very valid point =)

very very very valid lol

how do you go about getting an accurate measure for whats being drawn by the PC from the wall socket?

In wattage terms, Ive read that S1(fans on) may as well be completly on anyway, but S3(fans off) is not much more that S4(Hibernate).

also, has anyone used/seen this program before? you can use it to set the BIOS RTC alarm. I thought maybe a plugin could be used to pluck the next scheduled recording time out of the GBPVR database and feed it to the program. maybe several pitfalls to it though, such as (looking at all the warnings on that page) frying your bios!:eek:

[garyeuph]

Hmm - Power savings do indicate using hibernate if there is that much difference (though it does switch all fans off) - I do not have the electronics to measure the power draw, so I guess I wll leave it at hibernate

[pwborders]

Unless your system is very unusual suspend (S3) and hibernate (S4) should be almost identical in power usage. They both have to keep the same hardware powered that is allowed to wake the machine. The only difference is that S3 keep a low power memory refresh running, which doesn't amount to more than a few watts. S1 would be alot more as that is just basically stopping the processor and turning of video and hard drives. The main difference between S1/S3 and S4 is that S4 reinitializes all the hardware as if you had rebooted, then loads the memory state from the hard drive and resumes. Sometimes that reinitialization can be very useful if you have troublesome hardware.

As far as measuring power usage you really need something that can handle AC power correctly. There are some inexpensive (<$30) wattmeters. A normal DVM is not going to do AC current very well but I would think it would be ok for relative measurments. If your S3 and S4 are really that different I don't think your motherboard is actually going into S3 correctly.

[pwborders]

Once you start reading on the net about suspend issues you find it is a very previlent problem. I don't think it is really an issue of a bad motherboard or bios design I just think there are still no good standards in place for alot of the part and how they interact.

Things are getting better though. It wasn't long ago that desktop boards couldn't do S3 (suspend to ram) at all and S4 (hibernate (suspend to disk)) was rare and generally the realm of laptop machines. Now most desktop boards can at least do S4 and many do S3 just fine if all the additional hardware cooperates.

In my pvr's case I had a revision 1.04 version motherboard that wasn't reliable in S3 but when I replaced it with a version 2.0 board it now works perfectly.