HTPC sleeping/hibernating for no apparent reason

[Annisman*]

Trying to find out why my htpc will randomly hibernate/go to sleep. It does this at random times sometimes after 20 minutes, sometimes 2 hours or not at all. It doesn't shut down completely, the screen will go blank and the power button will start blinking, when I hit the power button it shortly brings me back to where I was at.

This is very annoying to be watching a movie and have the htpc go to sleep !

I've gone into power management and disabled every single sleep or hibernate parameter. Is there an event log or anything I can look at after it does this to see what is triggering it ? Halp ?

 

[celtekk]

computer management > event viewer

don't know if it'll tell you that you're computer is going to sleep, though.

 

[Automaticman]

What player are you using to watch movies? It may not be telling your PC to stay awake becasue you are watching something. I would think that turning off sleep in power management would make this a moot point though.

I did have an issue a while ago where my PC would go to sleep within a minute of finishing a movie, as soon as it got the signal that multimedia was no longer playing.

You might try manually forcing off hibernation using powercfg -h (in an elevated command prompt. At the very least this will make going to sleep and waking up much faster since it doesn't have to write everything in RAM to the HDD anymore.

Here's a list of the many options for powercfg

http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/?get_group_doc=6/1317236549-PowercfgCommand-lineoptions.pdf

 

[Annisman*]

I'm using windows media center (assasin's htpc guide). The problems seemed to have started after adding one of these: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B003X2...&robot_redir=1

I currently have three hdd's in it, holding most of my media. So I initially thought the hdd's were not synching correctly or something, but the thing is, I have an internal 3TB hdd that holds some media, and even when playing a movie off of that hard drive it has hibernated.

 

[Charlie98]

I've gone into power management and disabled every single sleep or hibernate parameter. Is there an event log or anything I can look at after it does this to see what is triggering it ? Halp ?

Did you adjust the multimedia settings? 'Prevent idling to sleep'?

 

[Annisman*]

Did you adjust the multimedia settings? 'Prevent idling to sleep'?

Yes sir, every single parameter in advanced power settings is set to prevent idling to sleep, including harddrive and usb suspension, everything is disabled that I can find there.

 

[Automaticman]

Maybe check to see if you have some background task going on that tells the pc to sleep when it is done. Like how handbrake can put a pc to sleep when it finishes ripping, or a download manager can do the same when downloads complete. Are there any other processes start with windows and could possibly have some option to tell the PC to sleep.

I know media browser for WMC has a service that can run in the background and has a background scan/cleanup function that runs occasionally. I think you can set it to wake the computer for the scan, maybe it has a sleep when complete function? Or any other process along those lines...

Unfortunately, while powercfg has a "lastwake" query, I don't think there is a last sleep command.

 

[Annisman*]

I am using media browser, so I will take a look into that. The thing is, I've had scenarios where: boot htpc, play movie, X amount of time later pc sleeps, turn htpc back on, Y amount of time later pc sleeps again. So if it was a background program that just completed after X, why would pc sleep again after Y ?