Wake from Standby in the Middle of the Night

**matthewtoney** · 05-05-2005, 12:14 PM

In any of your projects where someone is actively "syncing" content (whether it be music, video, RSS feeds, etc.) from the CarPC to a workstation or server in your home, can you comment on what method you used to do so?

In particular, I have a laptop that is to be used as my CarPC, and although I know I can make it wake up from standby in the middle of the night and run a task (at least that seems to work inside the house on one of my Media Center XP machines) I'm curious as to the "gotchas" that might be involved in this. I have the laptop set to go to standby after 1 minute without power normally, I'm wondering if it wakes up from that in the middle of the night to grab some files from my server whether it will just go right BACK to standby after 1 minute of activity.

**Enforcer** · 05-05-2005, 12:28 PM

Probably.

**WebDog** · 05-05-2005, 12:41 PM

Just try it.

**god_of_cpu** · 05-05-2005, 12:53 PM

I have my carputer start syncing up when it detects shutdown. It cancels the shutdown and if it detects my home wifi connection it begins the transfer and will shutdown the computer once it finishes. If it doesn't finish in 5 minutes. It pauses the transfer and the resumes the shuts down automatically. I have an OPUS too so if for some reason the program crashes or the computer doesn't turn off when it should, the OPUS will force it off after 15 minutes.

The big problem I see with resuming the computer is you'll have to worry about extraordinary circumstances more. Particularly at boot time if you get a BIOS error the computer will stay on showing the error same thing goes if the OS or your sync software fails to start. Then you also have to worry about how your going to turn on and off your computer for these special conditions as well as when you want to use it normally. i.e. Wont the computer just go into standby while syncing files if its set to go into standby after 1 minute of being without power?

**archimense** · 05-05-2005, 01:14 PM

Originally Posted by god_of_cpu

I have my carputer start syncing up when it detects shutdown. It cancels the shutdown and if it detects my home wifi connection it begins the transfer and will shutdown the computer once it finishes. If it doesn't finish in 5 minutes. It pauses the transfer and the resumes the shuts down automatically.

What software and settings are you using to achieve this?

**matthewtoney** · 05-05-2005, 01:44 PM

Exactly what I was going to ask next.

**reefhippie** · 05-05-2005, 06:14 PM

If you're running an FTP/TFTP/SSL server or whatever on the computer in your house, you can write a simple batch file and add it to the logoff section in your group policy.

**0l33l** · 05-05-2005, 06:26 PM

My Asus P4PE board has a wake at certain time function... don't know who the hell uses that on a full ATX board

**reefhippie** · 05-05-2005, 10:56 PM

That's a great feature for Enterprise Network Administrators who are responsible for automating routine scheduled maintenance on desktops across the LAN/WAN.