Boot to Record

[Amused]

I'm going on holiday soon and would idealy like to leave my PC to do the recording of programs while I'm away rather then the aging VCR.

I can't get sleep mode to work under vista, it's a hardware thing not a GBPVR thing. Once in sleep nothing, and I mean NOTHING, will wake the damn thing. If I set it to record it continues to sleep until about five minutes after the start time when in resets, re-boots and, once vista had finished loading, starts recording five mins late!

I havn't got time to play and find out what's causing this. What I would like is for the PC to turn itself on, record the program and then shut down again afterwards. I'm guessing GBPVR doesn't do this but does anyone know of a progamme which will boot up the pc from cold? Something which sets a bios alarm?

Amused

[HtV]

If I set it to record it continues to sleep until about five minutes after the start time when in resets, re-boots and, once vista had finished loading, starts recording five mins late!

If it does this consistently you could raise the prepadding time to e.g. 10 mins, that should do it.

[zeroexecutioner]

If I am correct in what you are asking, then I believe that there isn't anything that will do what you want it to. Once the computer is shutdown, very few things can wake it up(power switch, wake on lan, wake on ring, wake on KB). If your computer is just sleeping, and not shut completely down, then HtV is correct and that may be your only option.

[herrmannj]

the topic standy by can be really complicated. the most reliable way for "switched off with waking up possibility" is called s4 (hibernate). It must be activated in the Bios as well as in the Windows power settings. the most frequent cause for not wake up after suspend or hibernate are incorrect or wrong drivers.

as a quick fix: you could all drivers not necessarily used for the record-pvr functions deactivate (sound, net and so on) and try if vista can hibernate and after that wake up (press the on button to check wake up).

if so, for the time being everything is correct. set up windows power saving for hibernate. Else you have do dig deeper (bios updates etc)

joerg

[Amused]

Thanks for the suggestions. Raising the pre-padding is certainly a possibility, i'll try some tests before I go. I know you can set a bios alarm to boot from cold at a set time, and I know UPS setups shut down the system if the backup power is running low and set a timer to boot up in x hours to see if power has been restored. If not and the UPS power is still low then it shuts down again and the BIOS RTC is set for x hours again etc... I was hoping for a piece of software which set the BIOS RTC alarm but I can't find anything - it seems it might not even exist.

As for sleep/hybinate neither work. I can enter sleep (S3) or hibernate (S4) but once asleep pressing the power button does SFA. I'm forced to reset the machine.
Hibernate is different. At the scheduled time the machine powers up but the monitor never turns back on. Hard drive LED shows activity but I can't ever resume. When I reset GBPVR hasn't recorded which suggests behind the blank monitor the system never resumed properly. It must be a hardware/driver issue because sleep never has worked since I got the machine back in March - the trouble of having a tailor made system. It's not been a problem before since I shut down when I don't need the machine. I could just leave the machine on. Bizarrely it's set to Sleep after 2 hours of inactivity but no fans power down and i can resume so I think its not true sleep mode.

Thanks for the help and ideas anyway guys.

Amused

[SuMo]

take a look at this thread, maybe there is some info you can use.