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I need time-scheduled energy-plans in Windows

Posted by Daniel Hölbling on August 11, 2009

I run my main PC almost 24/7 because I use it to host all sorts of data on it (TV Shows, Music etc) that I then stream to my Laptop, TV or XBox to consume somewhere in the house. So the PC is constantly running and I don’t like wasting energy.

I’ve configured my PC to go to hibernation after 45 minutes of idle time, and Windows is smart enough to detect when files are open over the network and will not hibernate while the data is actively in use.
Where it gets problematic is when I am doing something else (like eating) and then want to watch something off my PC. While I was eating the PC went to hibernation and I need to go up one floor just to hit a spacebar and head back down to the TV.

Obvious solution would be to simply shut off hibernation and let the PC run the whole day. But that then is bad since I like watching stuff on my laptop in bed. So when I turn off the laptop I want confidence that the PC will hibernate shortly after without me having to get out of bad at that time.

So, what I want is a setting that allows me to tell Windows to run energy profile 1 during the day where hibernation is completely off, while running energy profile 2 after 10pm so I don’t need to worry about shutting down the PC.

I guess I could write a service to do exactly that, but I believe it would be a great feature to see out of the box in Windows 8 (if they decide to follow some sane naming rules this time)

The much better solution anyway would be to get some NAS to store my stuff in my server closet so my PC can sleep through 70% of the day while I can still access all my media. Unfortunately most consumer-level NAS solutions are still too expensive or just not performing well enough.

Ps: One nice thing on the green-computing side of things that comes with Win7 is that they hide the “Maximum Power, minimum saving” option by default from the menu. You have to click “More energy-plans” to see that.
I guess it doesn’t matter at all, since most users savvy enough to use that dialog probably know what they want anyway, but it sends the right message.

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