Standby issue

[duragezic]

I wanted to put my computer to go on standy/low-power mode after a few hours of non-use. I wanted to try it on mine so I can try and tell my roommates that if they refuse to not run their computer 24/7 (though only being used for a fraction of that time) then at least put it on standby.


I simply put mine to go to standby after about 3 hours, but when I came back it would not come out of standby. I had to reset. I seem to hear a lot of desktops having issues with standby modes and even laptops. Some work, some don't?

Is there something to do to get it to work or is it just picky? I have the newest nForce 4 drivers, as well as the newest BIOS. I have a lot of the MS hotfix updates but probably not all.

Or should I try something like hibernate? Or anything else I can do? I hear the power usage really drops a lot on standby, which with monitors on standby too would save a lot of electricity/money with all of the computers.

Also, is there any way to wake it up if I wanted to access it via network (Xbox for streaming stuff)? Wake-up-on Lan I've heard of but not really fmilar. This is secondary and only if I can get a standby to work anyway.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Uh, what's it to you whether your roommates shut off their computers or not? They "refuse" to run them 24x7? Why should they if they don't want to? Why does it matter so much that they use standby instead of shutting them off?

What happens when you try to bring it out of standby? Are you just trying to tap a keyboard key or move the mouse, or are you actually pressing the power button? Yes a lot of systems do have issues with standby to varying degrees.

The BIOS controls the S1 to S3 standby modes. Check the configuration for Power Management in the BIOS setup. This will also be where you can specify whether the system can be woken by PCI device activity or other things. I don't think most consumer desktop mainboards include an option for wake-on-LAN. The network controller is integrated into the chipset usually now (and is not a PCI device), but I don't think any of them bother to implement the circuitry for the wake-on-LAN signal. PCI network cards usually have the header pins for the connector, but most mainboards don't have the pins to connect it. (Many OEM systems do have them though, especially business machines.) Additionally, wake-on-LAN requires software on another machine to send the "magic packet" that causes the wakeup, so just trying to wake it up from your Xbox wouldn't work.

S3 is suspend to RAM and is very low power. S1 is low power but basically just shuts off the highest-power devices like hard drives and maybe fans.

Hibernation mode is the lowest power mode of standby. It saves the OS state to a file on disk and then shuts the computer down (in normal ATX soft-off mode which is what happens when you press the power button). This will almost certainly work even if the BIOS is flaky about the other "sleep" modes, because when it boots up it's just doing a normal bootup and then the boot record on the hard drive has been modified to know it needs to load from the hibernation file instead of doing a normal boot. It's faster than a normal boot, but much slower than starting from S3 mode.

If you have several computers, shutting them off or using hibernate (or S3 mode) could save a lot of money. If you saved 200W of actual usage between the monitor and PC being shut down, for 12 hours a day, that's 72KWH of energy saved per month. At the 16 cents per KWH I pay, that's 11.52 a month. Not a whole lot if you only have one computer that you're paying the electricity for, but worth it if you really don't care about the little extra bootup time or aren't running applications you don't want to have shut down all night. Assuming you and your roommates split the electrical bill equally, you'll all be paying equal amounts even if one machine or the other uses more power of course. Getting all the machines shut down or on standby much of the time, if you've got several machines in the house, will see a pretty big drop in the total bill but each person's share will only go down by about the amount of a single machine's usage.

Actually, at the moment, you're screwing your roommates if you split the electrical bill equally, since they're shutting off their computers and saving money, while you have yours on all the time.

 

[duragezic]

I'm not telling them they can't use their computers, but a blatant waste of power everyday by several computers really sucks. When you go to bed and go to class all day until say 4PM, that's like 16 hours where the computer is not used and idling at 110+ W. And actually I'm the only one who shuts my computer off. I guess I wasn't that clear, I meant if they absolutely have to have them on 24/7 (which really makes no sense if it's being used 50% of the time or less), then please have some consideration for someone paying out of their own pocket and put it to standy or hibernate after a couple of hours. And yeah, utility rates for my area rose 15% this summer, so its only going to get worse.

I'm trying out the standby on my own so that I can get them to use it even though I shut mine off.

When I tried to bring it out of regular Standby, I was simply pressing keys on the keyboard and moving the mouse. I thought this was how they would be woken up. I'll have to look at the BIOS though, and actually I didn't have the newest BIOS so I upgraded it. I'll be toying with the different modes sometime today to see if I can get anything to work. And I just got Cool N' Quiet for myself since I don't really need the full power of my computer unless I'm gaming.

Thanks for the helpful reply though. I kinda figured the Wake on LAN wouldn't happen cause yeah I haven't used a PCI NIC in a long time which is where I remember the additional connector being.

 

[duragezic]

Ok, there wasn't many BIOS options for Power Management.

I change Soft-Off by PBTN to Delay 4 second [momentary press will make the system go into Suspend Mode]

I also enabled WOL and Power ON function was switched to where I could do a keypress to bring it out of Suspend.

Then in Windows Power Management, I swtiched the function of the 'Press Power Button' to 'Standby'. I left System Standby as Never (though I will probably switch this to 3-4 hours so I dont have to manually set the system to standby).

But what I dont know is what kind of Suspend/Standby I'm using. There was never any mention of S1 to S3 modes. Hibernate sounds kinda useless since my system boots fast anyway. It sounds like my chipset fan runs at full speed when its in Standby/Suspend which is kind of weird because it normally it only runs at full speed during part of the POST/boot up. But the mode I'm using shows XP as 'preparing for standby' then it goes black, hard disks spin down, etc. It returned from Standby to my desktop within 3 seconds or so.


So does this sound like S3? If so, does the config sound ok? Like for power usage vs. time to return, is this the best one?