Standby Issues Solved

[Dava]

I recently added a new 8600GTS to my HTPC and while doing this managed to break my machine which previously would standby and resume perfectly, let me tell you how so that these can be avoided for you too.

Whilst in the BIOS for the init VGA setting, I couldn't resist changing some other features.

In my 780G BIOS, I had an option for "away mode" for MCE use, which I put to on. Bad! this stops the machine from going into S3 properly, even with XP it seems!

I also enabled Cool'n'Quiet, the AMD clock stepping feature. This is great as, at idle, it drops the clocks from 2300 to 900MHz, reducing power and heat and therefore fan noise. The problem seems to be that the PVRX2 screensaver uses more than 10% of the CPU at 900MHz which stops Windows power management from kicking in (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/899975), preventing standby. Disabling the PVRX2 Screensaver or leaving the clock at 2300 solved this.


When installiing the processor driver, it wiped all of my power profiles and greyed out all the boxes, you can restore defaults with "powercfg /RestoreDefaultPolicies" (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913622). It seems that deleting the unwanted schemes (why do I need "Max Battery" on an HTPC????) causes problems, so my advice is to leave the defaults intact.

Vista has a new option in Powercfg.exe, -lastwake which will tell you why the machine woke up. Unfortunately under XP, I did not have this.

WOL still works fine but in my experience, you must make sure that "Only allow management stations to wake...." is checked and send a WOL packet, otherwise every little tid bit of network traffic destined for the box will wake it. I put a startup script in the router which would look for a connection request on the webadmin WAN port and send a WOL to the HTPC as a result. This makes it so that the first request to view a page (when asleep) takes a few more seconds to load, but no manual WOLing required for phones, PDAs etc. when away from home.


The last piece of the puzzle was the PVRX2 screensaver which I had to disable, is there a way to reduce its priority instead as I liked it for music?

[fuzzweed]

is there a way to reduce its priority instead as I liked it for music?

if you mean process priority then this app is rather neat http://www.prnwatch.com/prio.html but I'm not sure this would reduce it's overall CPU load.......

[Dava]

if you mean process priority then this app is rather neat http://www.prnwatch.com/prio.html but I'm not sure this would reduce it's overall CPU load.......

I like the look of that. Good find. thanks.

[mmatheny]

A tool called ProcessLasso can control the CPU usage on a per process basis. I use it to keep the programs I want running at full speed, while throttling other background processes.

[Dava]

The problem with this approach is that I presume that the SS runs in the PVRX2 process rather than having its own. I don't want to throttle PVRX2 for playback.

Its a bit tricky to prove this though as I can't easily see processes when the SS is running!

Sub, can you confirm if it is the same process?

[carpeVideo]

Try the hibernator - it sleeps/hibernates on measured thresholds, so if you measure with the screensaver load it will still sleep.

Of course if playback is less than that load it might sleep then which would be annoying :0)

[fuzzweed]

you could ditch the built in screen saver and define any windows .scr screensaver as a custom task in config and launch it manually when listening to music

[Dava]

Thanks for the replies. The reason I like the built in SS for music is that it displays the track names, I will loose that if I go to an SCR but it is nice to know that it is possible!


I also found last night that even setting the SS refresh interval to 90sec and the Windows idle standby time to 1 min will not let is sleep.

It must be very borderline on my system with the other background processes.
I will look into hibernator as this sounds like the most suitable for my needs, I can tweak it the other side of the border!

[frankmcg]

Note that in my experience hibernator doesn't work with VMR9FSE in case that effects you.

[Dava]

Note that in my experience hibernator doesn't work with VMR9FSE in case that effects you.

I was just about to register and download it when I saw this. Thanks for saving me the effort as I do use FSE!

I am currently looking at monitoring CPU, Disk and Net activity in Autoit to do something like Hibernator myself. The CPU bit is done so far but I am having to delve into the wonders of WMI. Time permitting, I will continue down this road with the SS turned off for the time being.