How to get 'away' mode unattended wake-up for tv record

[Jeff D]

If I schedule a tv recording and put my HTPC to sleep, it fully wakes up to do the unattended recording at the right time but with the display on and everything running rather than in 'Away' mode as I have set up on the same machine under Vista. I used a great little program called MCE Standby to set this up in Vista but there is not yet a fully functional version for W7.

How can I stop it from fully waking when it awakes for an unattended task from sleep as I don't want the display to come on, particularly when I'm not at home or in the middle of the night.

I've been through all the forums on sleep problems but they all focus on getting the computer to sleep or to wake up. I don't have any problems with this but can't get it to use 'away' mode.

Has anybody got any advice on how to get it to behave as it should?

 

[zigzag3143]

get away

If I schedule a tv recording and put my HTPC to sleep, it fully wakes up to do the unattended recording at the right time but with the display on and everything running rather than in 'Away' mode as I have set up on the same machine under Vista. I used a great little program called MCE Standby to set this up in Vista but there is not yet a fully functional version for W7.

How can I stop it from fully waking when it awakes for an unattended task from sleep as I don't want the display to come on, particularly when I'm not at home or in the middle of the night.

I've been through all the forums on sleep problems but they all focus on getting the computer to sleep or to wake up. I don't have any problems with this but can't get it to use 'away' mode.

Has anybody got any advice on how to get it to behave as it should?

If nothing else you could run the vista version in compatibility mode.

Ken

 

[Jeff D]

I will give that a try. I wanted to see firstly whether W7 would do it properly before I tried any third party apps. I am surprised that W7 doesn't have a similar little interface for setting up power options particular to Media Centre as the ability to sleep/wake up/sleep unattended, etc is very fundamental to an HTPC setup with live TV.

 

[mikinho]

I will give that a try. I wanted to see firstly whether W7 would do it properly before I tried any third party apps. I am surprised that W7 doesn't have a similar little interface for setting up power options particular to Media Centre as the ability to sleep/wake up/sleep unattended, etc is very fundamental to an HTPC setup with live TV.

Dumb question but do you have Away Mode enabled? Start > Run, type powercfg.cpl -> Advanced Settings -> Multimedia settings -> When sharing media -> Setting: Allow the computer to enter Away Mode

Personally I don't like Away Mode so what I've done on my HTPC is enable Sleep and setup a schedule so that during the hours that I'm normally not home if the computer is woken up by anything but a HID then the sleep time is 1 minute. Not exactly what you'd like but it has worked well for me.

 

[Jeff D]

Thanks for the advice. I thought I did this through the advanced power settings but it didn't seem to work. I have now sorted it by installing the latest version of MCE Standby Tool using compatability mode for Vista. There is an option to use away mode and now everything is working as it should. So I'm happy now!

 

[johngalt]

Making mention of newer builds of this app that are Windows 7 pseudo-compatible - see MCE Standby Tool 0.9.094 on Windows 7 for the latest build (as of now) and see MCE Standby Tool 0.9.094 on Windows 7 for the thread where Herman is developing this app for Windows 7 compatibility.

Stickified