Schedule system reboot

[woodbe]

I know this may sound strange, but I need to reboot my computer periosically to keep it happy. The problem I always have is to reboot it when the BTV is not recording. What I was hoping to be able to do is create a scheduled reboot that would happen outside of the recording times. Basically it would be able to look at the schedule and restart when no shows were being recorded.

I have not been able to find any way to do this in the system, and haven't foudn a thread for anything quite like this. If it's not possible, then I'll do something else, but I would like to do it through here as then I wouldn't need to worry about that odd show at 2am that comes on that I want to record not occurring correctly.

Thanks

[HomeyFour]

Use PowerOff: http://users.pandora.be/jbosman/applications.html

[woodbe]

Thank you for the application suggestion. My question though, is how to take something like that, and schedule it so that it will not reboot if something is recording.

For example, let's say I setup the program to reboot the computer every day at 2am. The next day though, I have a recording scheduled from 1-3am. I don't want the computer to restart in the middle of the program, so I would either like to have the reboot delayed or cancelled until the next time.

Is there a process that runs while a program is recording that I can tell this program to look for and then wait until it is done before a reboot? If that is the case, then I can have something that would reboot only when the program isn't running, but I don't think this program will let me do that.

Thanks again.

[RiderFan]

I reboot weekly as well. Just schedule the reboot when you know that you won't have a recording...3-4-5 AM etc. There must be a time in a 24 hour day that you aren't recording.
Even if you reboot during a recording, you'll just lose about 1 min and BTV will start recording again after the reboot.

[spyboy]

What the original poster is looking for (as am I) is a tool that will:

1) look at the recording schedule (usually I manually do this in BTV4 by looking at what's coming up to record)

2) pick a window (let's say we need at least 2-3 hours of open space to do a reboot..incase there's a checkdisk or anything else like that involved) (some people run system cleanup tools)

3) if there's no available 2-3 hour block, no reboot happens. If it's saturday and the next available 2-3 hour block is next thursday, then that's when there will be a reboot.

4) optional functionality would be the ability to run a few other programs before shutdown, such as forced virus scanner update, or apply windows patches

any programmers up to the challenge to write something?

[Xiadix]

Ok, I just had an interesting idea. Currently I have a batch file set to reboot my system weekly. I just picked a time when I was least likely to be watching or recording a show. I haven't yet had a show interrupted becasue of a reboot. However, seeing your request it would be nicer.

My idea is to use "if not exist" in my batch file. Based on the fact that when a show is recording there is a showname.xml file. This file is deleted when the show has finished recording. If showsqueeze is enabled, it might not get deleted until after that has run. There are a few *.dat files that are created as well, but I am not sure if BTV cleans them up normally or I set up a batch file to delete them regulary. Those might be able to be used as well. If that is the case, then you could have the reboots not affect watching shows as well.

What I am going to do now is change my batch file to have the "If not exist" search for an xml. If there isn't one, then it will continue to reboot. If there is one, I will try again next week.

KevG

[tscales]

careful, xml will exist if you use smartchapter. better to use *.inprogress.*

[woodbe]

Thank you Spyboy, that is right on track with what I am looking for. My thinking though, would be something like this:

1. You go into recording setup
2. You choose to create a reboot job
3. You choose from the reboot job the frequency of the reboot, once a week, once a day, certain days of the week, etc
4. The job would then be added into the recording list as the lowest priority job. If any other recording conflicted with it, the reboot wouldn't happen

Ideally, a really smart version would be able to reschedule the conflicting job to occur say 15 minutes after the recording finished (or maybe longer), that way you wouldn't potentially miss a reboot (say if you have found you need the weekly reboot, missing it could cause problems later).

Thanks for your input.

[karhill]

Originally Posted by woodbe

Thank you Spyboy, that is right on track with what I am looking for. My thinking though, would be something like this:

1. You go into recording setup
2. You choose to create a reboot job
3. You choose from the reboot job the frequency of the reboot, once a week, once a day, certain days of the week, etc
4. The job would then be added into the recording list as the lowest priority job. If any other recording conflicted with it, the reboot wouldn't happen

Ideally, a really smart version would be able to reschedule the conflicting job to occur say 15 minutes after the recording finished (or maybe longer), that way you wouldn't potentially miss a reboot (say if you have found you need the weekly reboot, missing it could cause problems later).

Thanks for your input.

You can have BTV fire off a process after a recording has been made...So manually add a recording, as the lowest priority, that is really just a reboot recording. The post-recording process does a reboot. Schedule the recording to end at something like h:01 (1 minute after the hour), so the post-recording process takes place in a time slot that has effectively been claimed by the manual recording.

[Chuckwagon]

I actually use Windows Task Scheduler to pop off my reboots, using Shutdown.exe. When you schedule the task you can specify that it not run unless the system has been idle for x amount of time, and if it hasn't been it will retry for up to x minutes. I use it to Hibernate my system at night, then I wake it up before my recordings will start and perform a reboot to clear everything up. It's been working very well for a couple weeks now.

Chuck