Always-On or Standby survey???

[burchis]

I am wondering what others members do regarding their HTPC. Do you leave your system running 24/7, or set the power management to enter standby mode after a preset time?

I guess I am wanting someone to tell me what I should do here. Currently my system enters standby after 20 minutes. I do not leave my TV on while I'm in bed so why should I leave my HTPC on.

Any thoughts on this from anyone?

[Talk4Cheap]

I keep the BTV server and Link running 24/7 on both. Mostly as a convenience to keep it as much a "normal" tv as possible. All odd jobs like antivirus scanning, weekly restart and weekly defrag happen in the middle of the night. It requires no intervention from me whatsoever 99% of the time. It's not the most efficient way to use it, but I'm willing to pay the extra money on my electric bill.

I just want to be able to pick up the remote, turn the tv on and watch what I want without having to mess with anything else. I've been doing it this way for over 2 years now and it works for me. Of course YMMV

[ZetaVu]

There are other threads like this, mine goes into standby after 20 minutes inactivity. (s3) Once you sort out all the program bugs (windows and hardware issues) it's very reliable.

[Nick Burns]

Likewise. Mine is set for 30min (S3). Just wish I can figure someway to wake it up via remote.

[Fonceur]

I also use the standby after 20 minutes. I simply move the wireless mouse to wake the system.

The only reason I can see for not using this feature, is if you have some BTV-Link PC's (though a batch file with wake-on-lan could probably handle that) or as Zetavu mentioned, if you have some buggy hardware/software which doesn't come out of standby cleanly.

[Killer Bob]

Mine stays on all the time, If I could wake it up with the remote I would have it go to sleep but I had issues with the usb waking it up the second it went to sleep and then things acted wacky. Zeta actually hit the nail on the head, If you can get all the hardware bugs worked out BTV does what it is suppose to do. Unfortunately my hardware gave me nothing but grief when playing with that aspect. Thus mine stays on

[Bigbird999]

Originally Posted by Nick Burns

Likewise. Mine is set for 30min (S3). Just wish I can figure someway to wake it up via remote.

And therein lies the problem. Climb into bed, adjust pillows, get all nice and comfy and settled down to watch Lost. Use TV remote to turn on your HDTV, TV displays "no signal", grab firefly to wake up HTPC, it doesn't, get out of comfy bed dig out mouse or keyboard from its hiding place, wiggle/hit a key, HTPC wakes up, climb into bed, adjust pillows, get all nice and comfy............

And rather than spend another $100 on a remote keyboard, just to wake up your HTPC, decide - screw the environment, global warming, vampire electric loads and the extra $5 a month electric bill and disable standby.

BTW, did I mention that I really hate getting up out of bed once I have settled in???

YMMV, but that's just how I see it.

[Cal]

I should look into standby. But I currently leave it on all the time. It does a nightly sync of the shows to a master Unraid server and a weekly defrag in the night. But there is no reason why it can't go into standby mode.

I access it fairly often from work to set stuff up via Ultra VNC because I like the interface. Can a system be woken up remotely? I know I can wake it up from another machine via the network card but can that be done over the internet? I wonder what port that needs.

Then there is the issue of not being able to remotely sched something from a phone. If the box is off until it needs to wake up to record something then its not going to be checking with snapstream every 15min for remote recordings. Not that big of a deal. I don't use it often, but its nice when I do use it.

[ZetaVu]

You can also setup to wake via network, usually with a magic packet, I've never tried this for remote record jobs but I can start it up with my wifi pda, or any link machine (about 10 second delay). I've never setup a bluetooth adaptor on this pc, but you could do that (or with a bluetooth/wifi router) and then use a phone to wake and run all commands with the firefly mini plugin.

Nicer computers with low fan noise/power consumption can probably do just as well staying on.

[nanook105]

For the amount of money that you could potentially save, it will cost you more in time spent setting it up

[rooobosmith]

Standby after 5 minutes.

Wireless keyboards for wakeup are cheap.

I do wish firefly could do the wakeup, though.

[Fickey]

Standby after 20 min (used to be Hibernate but Standby works better for me), with a wireless mouse solely for wakeup.

[redlion4]

Always on here. Tried for months to use Standby (S3). Got everything to work fine from Standby except for SmartChapter generation. The PC would never wake up at midnight to generate them. Gave up...

[EightPaws]

Mine is set for Standby (S3) after 10 minutes. Each show has post processing, VideoRedo to flag the commercials then the pc goes into standby. It waits to go into standby if VideoRedo is processing a show file. I can wake it up via keyboard in the entertainment center or from any other networked pc by sending a magic packet. It is sometimes inconvenient but I'm cheap and don't want to piss away the electric.

[rooobosmith]

Originally Posted by redlion4

Always on here. Tried for months to use Standby (S3). Got everything to work fine from Standby except for SmartChapter generation. The PC would never wake up at midnight to generate them. Gave up...

I have mine set to wakeup for a Scheduled Task at 4AM to defrag the disk.

It also does SmartChapter at the same time. Seems to work reliably.