Top Tip: Control windows power plans to manage windows sleep settings

[gEd]

I always found that the problem with having windows set to sleep when idle is was that the PC was asleep when I actually want it to be awake.

I want my NextPVR PC to be on during the evening so that when we sit down for TV dinners, I can just click "play" from the UIDroid client on my TV without having to faff about with waking the PC up first. 

I also have my music streaming software (Roon) running on the PC and again, I want to be able to just click play and stream music from the server without having to wake the PC up first.
The rest of the time, I want the PC to just wake up when it needs to (to record a show or perform updates) and then just go back to sleep again afterwards as I don't want the PC running 24x7.

My eureka moment was when I realised that I can run a scheduled task to tell windows what power plan to use.  This page gave me all the information that I needed to set this up.

I have a powerplan called "Stay Awake" which has sleep mode disabled and I run a scheduled task at 17:45 that wakes the PC up and activates the Stay Awake power plan so the PC stays awake all evening.
Then at midnight, I run another scheduled task that changes the power plan back to Balanced (which has a 10min idle timer set) and then PC will go to sleep at some point thereafter.

It works perfectly. I might tweak it a bit to wake up a bit earlier during the weekend, easy enough in the task scheduler.

Just sharing here in case this proves to be of any use to anyone else.


[url=https://devblogs.microsoft.com/windows-music-dev/quickly-switching-your-power-plan-on-windows-10/][/url]

[mvallevand]

WOL is also on my todo list for uidroid and yauiclient. I have it in configured in knewc and automatic in the Roku channel.

Martin