Sleep after idle for xx minutes?

[Barleyman]

I can't get my machine to go to sleep / suspend / hibernate automatically with recording service active BUT NOT RECORDING.

 

I read some comments that for example the EPG update can stop suspend from happening? Is there a straightforward way to get W7 HTPC box to go to sleep after being idle for given time while running recording service?

 

Simply put, suspend works if I remove recording service but it's hardly optimal..

[Lars_MQ]

The service does not block, except a networkclient is connected, a recording is stastrating in the very near future or a timer is running. So you just have to find out what is the case. I can't help because my crystal ball is broken...

[Barleyman]

The service does not block, except a networkclient is connected, a recording is stastrating in the very near future or a timer is running. So you just have to find out what is the case. I can't help because my crystal ball is broken...

 

I wonder what "timer is running" would mean in this case. Autosearch timer anyone?

 

In any case this same problem has persisted through HTPC hardware upgrade with reinstalled XP home -> XP Pro and later reinstalled to W7 x32. On my 2 other PCs the automatic suspend works just as expected. FWIW, screen saver _does_ kick in atuomatically, as does screen blank, it's just the suspend/hibernate that won't happen.

[Barleyman]

I looks like I found the problem. In this instance it appears it's WMP related. 1st of all there's the "when sharing media" settings on power settings - If you have "homegroup" or WMP sharing media, by default the machine won't go to sleep. 2nd, if you have WMP sharing active ANYWHERE on your local network, WMP might start indexing the media on the remote computer and vice versa.

 

So by making sure homegroup and WMP media sharing was all disabled, the suspend works as expected.

 

What makes it interesting, thought, is that I had the same problem running on XP that does not have media server stuff to start with

 

Well anyways this should save me some 100€ / year if I can have the HTPC asleep most of the time..

[Barleyman]

So now I have the HTPC going to sleep as advertised. So far so good.

 

So far not so good is that .31 recording service appears to go comatose silently on the background. You won't find out before you try to watch TV and can't or you want to catch a show you record and it's not there. Nasty.

 

I updated to .55 which appears to have fixes related to resume after suspend. Maybe that helps. In any case the problem is made worse because you cannot stop the service anymore, it gets stuck to "stopping service" stage. So much for writing a batch file to restart the service.

 

Possibly I could make a more elaborate 2-stage batch job where the 1st job sets a flag, tries to restart the service and clears the flag if successfull. 2nd job checks for the flag after a delay and if it's present (=restarting service didn't work) reboots the machine.

 

More brute force solution would be to make the machine shut down instead of going to sleep. Timers will wake the computer from shutdown?

[Barleyman]

I haven't seen the service getting hung after updating to .55. Not yet anyways.

 

Occasionally the tuners do not come up properly, thought. It'd be good if the service tried to restart the tuner after it doesn't get data while recording like it does when resuming from suspend.