Windows 7 won't sleep when WMC recording scheduled?

[swechsler]

I'm working on setting up a whole-house system with 6 Windows 7 PCs running WMC and a couple of HDHomeRun Primes. I've been building Windows PCs for years so there's nothing new there, but I've never done much with WMC before. One thing I'm wondering about is how WMC handles scheduled recordings. I tested scheduling a recording last night and then tried to put the computer to sleep (the recording had not yet started), and it ignored the sleep request. I assumed that WMC would use the Windows scheduler to wake up for a scheduled recording, but is that not the case? Does it just stay on until the recording is completed? Or does it depend on how far in advance the recording is scheduled to take place? It did go to sleep sometime after the recording finished. I"m planning on using these with Harmony remotes, and the remotes will get confused if they expect the PC to turn off and it doesn't.

[Space]

If the PC is awake and you set a recording to record and there is less than 10 minutes before the recording is supposed to start, WMC will tell the PC to not go to sleep. If there is more than 10 minutes before the recording starts when you schedule the recording, it will wait until 5 minutes before the recording starts to tell the PC not to sleep. So in this case you can manually put the PC to sleep as long as it is more than 5 minutes before it is supposed to start recording.

In general, if the PC is sleeping, it will wake up 5 minutes before a recording is supposed to start. After the recording is completed (and there are no other recordings scheduled within, I think, 10 minutes) the PC will go to sleep after 2 minutes (at least that is how I have it configured, I forget if that is the default).

With my system, there is a bug (I think it is specific to my system), where if you push the power button on the remote to put the PC to sleep, but WMC has told the system to not sleep (due to a recording about to start, or already in progress), the system will go in to "away mode" (which means the monitor and other devices are put to sleep, but the CPU and hard drive stays awake so it can start/continue recording), this is how it is supposed to work. However on my system, after the recording is completed, the PC will not go to sleep on its own. It stays in away mode until it is put to sleep manually.

If the PC is already sleeping, it wakes up automatically to record a show and then goes back to sleep just fine. If it is recording and I leave the PC "on" (don't put it in to away mode), the recording will complete normally and the PC will go to sleep afterwards. I have the PC set to go to sleep after 1 hour of inactivity, which means if I don't touch the PC, it will either go to sleep (if no recordings in progress/about to start) or in to away mode (if recordings are in progress or about to be) automatically after 1 hour. If it goes in to away mode automatically (not manually by pressing the power button) everything works fine with going to sleep automatically after the recording is finished. It's only if I put it in to away mode manually where the problem occurs.

[swechsler]

Thanks for your response. Is this behavior documented anywhere? Is there any configuration in WMC for sleeping that can be done other than in Control Panel->Power settings?

[Space]

You can find info in bits in pieces on this forum, but I don't know if it is officially documented anywhere.

I am unaware of any power configuration within WMC itself, other than the screen saver (which is not really a power config), but there are some power settings that can be enabled that are not shown by default in the Control Panel->Power Settings.

One of them is 'System unattended sleep timeout' which is that 2 minute timeout I mentioned.

There are multiple entries in the registry, and each one that you set to "0" enables that option in the Power Settings.

Example for enabling 'System unattended sleep timeout':
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/721 ... ndows.html

Contains a spreadsheet listing other options:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads ... gs.767612/

There is also a script that enables ALL of the options, but it is for Win10 (although may work for Win7) and I'm not sure if you want to enable them all:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comm ... ced_power/

I think this script just outputs powercfg commands that you can selectively pick to enable the option or not (by running the powercfg command).

I'm not sure if any of these links are correct or do what they say, as I only dabbled in it a while ago and these links are just ones I happened to find now, so may not be the exactly the same as what I did years ago.

[joecrow]

I never got sleep and wakeup to work properly with WMC until I used the MCE Standby Tool app. Looks like it is still available at http://slicksolutions.eu/ and it worked fine with Win 7, I would recommend you to give it a try.

[DavidinCT]

One of the KEYS to getting this working correctly with Windows 7 is go into your bios and make sure E3 sleep is enabled and allow wakeup items. If you use a USB IR device, make sure you click allow USB devices to wake the computer. If you have a NEWER computer it might have a newer standard enabled. It's always been hit or miss on WMC on 7 with sleep with newer sleep settings.

With some tweaking, I was able to get it to work very well. It would wake 5-10 min before a recording, once finished it would go back to sleep, Hit the power button on the WMC remote, it woke or went back to sleep. it saved a whole $3 a month (sleep still uses power but, a lot lower, I figured out the numbers, using a Kill-A-Watt device). The other problem came up was, My WMC machine houses all my media, including music. So it has shared network drives. Each machine has a Program enabled that has all the music in it so you can listen to anything anywhere in the house.

The problem is, with sleep enabled, the music could not be accessed for a while (try to listen, WOL would wake it up, and 2-3 min later the music would play. I gave it up just so I can access it WHEN I need it.

[swechsler]

Well, assuming my power consumption and electric rates are the same as yours, that's 6 x $3 x 12, which makes it $216 a year. Not a huge amount, but probably worth spending a little time playing around with configuration (plus, as I said, I don't want the Harmony remotes to get confused). I did already ensure that E3 sleep is enabled in the BIOS, but I'll go back and double check the other settings.

[DavidinCT]

Well, assuming my power consumption and electric rates are the same as yours, that's 6 x $3 x 12, which makes it $216 a year. Not a huge amount, but probably worth spending a little time playing around with configuration (plus, as I said, I don't want the Harmony remotes to get confused). I did already ensure that E3 sleep is enabled in the BIOS, but I'll go back and double check the other settings.

I did my numbers based on 31 days a month, its sleep power used, it's recording power(based off power used when recording 2 shows and watching a live one) based off using it 5 hours a day (average), with the big numbers trying to figure out every single watt used or could be used, it was a saving of about $3 a month by my numbers 3 X 12 would be about $36-40 a year. It's why I didn't stick with it. $216 a year, I might of looked at it differently, I did this about 2 years ago, so it might be a little higher (I do keep track of our current power costs) but, not enough to give me a hassle with it. I DO set my Hard drives to spin down when not in use for an hour.


Riddle me this. If you set something in the morning to record, say an afternoon show, does it wake and record it correctly ?

[Alan G]

I never had any issues with configuring WMC and Sleep. IIRC, you set the wake up time within WMC and the sleep time after inactivity through power management. My set up wakes up three minutes before recording and goes to sleep 20 minutes after completion. There are a couple of issues to be aware of. If you use a wireless network connection, you need to make sure that it is configured not to wake the computer up otherwise it will wake up everytime the NIC pings for a signal. I use wireless for Netflix and Amazon Prime and FIOS for television service. The second one is that your PC's clock may slowly gain/lose (mostly lose in my case) time because the PC is sleeping when the PC is set to check and adjust the time. I've never been able to adequately address this issue and manually force it to check and adjust the time every month. I've tried to configure the clock adjustment for when the computer is awake and updating the EPG123 schedule. If you don't do this gradually programs will not be recorded properly.