Power Usage

[martint123]

Anyone know of anything that will shut pc down after a certain amount of time of inactivity
(I dont want hibernation or standby )

Out of curiosity, what is wrong with hibernate? it is the same as power off except for the disk file.
Could you use something like hibernate trigger to delete the hibernate file and thus make it do a full startup when switched on again?

There are plenty of things that will do a shutdown, but I only spotted retail (cost) ones that used a proper activity monitor before shutting down.

[imilne]

Out of curiosity, what is wrong with hibernate? it is the same as power off except for the disk file.

martint123 is completely correct about this, as I've often seen it mentioned that hibernate uses more power than shutdown. It doesn't. Hibernate takes the contents of memory, writes it to disk, then effectively shuts down. You can even turn the PC off at the wall if you want. It'll still come back from hibernation fine, and faster than it would from a cold boot too.

Where the confusion may come from is that both hibernate and "shut down" will still be drawing some power (usually 3-5 watts) while plugged in. That's just down to the way power supplies and motherboards work, and is for supporting stuff like wake-on-lan, USB resume etc. In theory there may be a tiny difference between them, but it would probably be less than a watt, and it's not anything I've ever been able to measure. In fact, with a lot of modern boards, you'd struggle to measure a difference between shutdown, hibernate, and standby; and all three should certainly be in the sub 5 watts power draw with a decent PSU. Just don't turn off at the wall if using the latter

[stustunz]

If you read a few post back I have a device that kills the power once the pc is shut down or put into standby.Then when you want to restart the pc you just hit your desired learnt button on the remote and it starts the pc from off
I though cool i will use hibernate then it will start back up all good BUT......
My network controller is not coming out of hibernate properly 100% of the time i get the big red X which means a restart anyway as the network controller stops responding repair connection doesnt work
where as from a fresh start i never get the red X

so although hibernate does work its not working for me 100% and 99% isnt good when the mrs goes to bed i get a angry why why why ??
plus machine always runs better from a fresh start
only take 40secs from cold boot to watching program

it only takes 5seconds longer to be watching a program between hibernate and start from cold
but i get 100% startup/watch from a restart


the thing is my standby box kills the monitor also
so its using 0.2watts

the numbers you quoted seem a little on the low side things in hibernate are more like 20 to 30 watts
and standby is hit and miss on what it leaves on or off can be as high as 70 watts
so my solution means i know its using no power as its OFF

[stustunz]

There's SmartShutdown plus Lifehacker has some thoughts here.

thanks thats what i was looking for
all the ones i found were either pay or didnt do exactly what i want

[imilne]

the numbers you quoted seem a little on the low side things in hibernate are more like 20 to 30 watts
and standby is hit and miss on what it leaves on or off can be as high as 70 watts

No, that can't be right at all. Hibernate (or standby) shouldn't be using more than a few watts. It has to be, otherwise laptops would continue to drain their batteries with hibernate - and they don't. What hardware are you using? The motherboard and the PSU being the important bits here.

There are several levels of standby, and the ones you want are S3 (power only to memory) and S4 (memory contents written to disk). There is another level of standby/suspend (S1 maybe?) that used to be common where a bunch of stuff switched off but I think the cpu/fan kept going. Maybe that's happening.

Regarding the network problem... are you using Windows 7? You could try disabling the link-layer discovery nonsense in the adapter settings. I've seen it cause problems after a resume.

Iain

[martint123]

The last time I checked mine, it was running at around 4 watts in standby and the same in hibernate.
This seems to be consumed by the sub-psu that is inside the main psu to provide enough for the motherboard to switch the main PSU on.
When I was running XP on my "playing about" machine, it used to have big red X through the network icon. I reckon this was because it had many devices in it over the years and XP was getting confused - a reinstall was recommend, but too painful to contemplate.

As you have found there don't seem to be any easy ways to power off instead of hibernate/standby - I suppose it could be possible to use either hibernate trigger or gbpvrwake to run "devcon reboot" when it starts up - the long way round, but should do what you need/

[stustunz]

yeah well i did real tests and measured what was going through the cable
as for laptops thats why they are better for power consumption they can shutdown fully
and yes probably does depend on motherboard/power supply etc but this pc is about 4years old retired to bedroom

yes i know about all the standby modes


nah still on xp this machine will never make it to W7

[stustunz]

The last time I checked mine, it was running at around 4 watts in standby and the same in hibernate.
This seems to be consumed by the sub-psu that is inside the main psu to provide enough for the motherboard to switch the main PSU on.
When I was running XP on my "playing about" machine, it used to have big red X through the network icon. I reckon this was because it had many devices in it over the years and XP was getting confused - a reinstall was recommend, but too painful to contemplate.

As you have found there don't seem to be any easy ways to power off instead of hibernate/standby - I suppose it could be possible to use either hibernate trigger or gbpvrwake to run "devcon reboot" when it starts up - the long way round, but should do what you need/

smart shut down is going to work by the looks

[whurlston]

I reckon this was because it had many devices in it over the years and XP was getting confused - a reinstall was recommend, but too painful to contemplate.

From a command prompt, type the following:

Code:

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
devmgmt.msc

When the Device Manager pops up, select "View" -> "Show hidden devices". You can then delete all the old hardware that is no longer installed.

You can also set that environment variable up permanently in Computer Properties and it will be active whenever you run the device manager (after a reboot). Works on Vista and Win 7 as well.

[stustunz]

@ imilne

other reason my desktop will use more power in hibernate in my situation is I want to be able to turn on with remote so motherboard has to have power to usb all the time there is my 25 extra watts