What’s This About?

WakeupOnStandBy  is a small program that will automatically wake up your computer from Standby or Hibernation mode at a predetermined schedule of time and days of the week, then run programs, open web pages, etc. before closing down your computer again if you want. It also has the ability to run multiple schedules allowing you to effectively shutdown and start your computer when you want.

Why Would You Want It?

Many computers are run 24/7 as a matter of convenience rather than necessity. Just to be able to get on the computer instantly without waiting for what might be quite a long boot period and get to your emails or instantly access web pages is a convenience. This is trade doff against the cost of running the PC and the consequential use of “scarce” resources, carbon footprint, global warming and a general disregard for he environment and future availability of resources for our children and grandchildren.

I am as bad as anyone and worse than many. I run several computers and some of them run 24/7 because I need them to be doing scheduled actions while  am not actively using them. These include indexing, backups, fetching email, etc. so the information is ready and available when I need. The fact is that these computers could be shutdown for several hours a day when I am at work or asleep without any real inconvenience. In fact unless your running a server of some sort or downloading over P2P networks you really don’t need any computer running all the time.

The recent severe increases in oil and gas prices has been a bit of a wake up call and started to make me look at ways of reducing my energy consumption so I can get the bills down. I am ashamed to admit it is the impact on my pocket and not my impact on the environment that has spurred me into action

So I am across WakeupOnStandBy in a search for a freeware program that would allow me to schedule the time my computer was running to suit my daily./weekly programme. As you will see it is not a perfect solution and could do with a bit of work to make it easier to use but it will certainly do the job needed with a little bit of perseverance.

However, if you want to save yourself some money or feel you should do your bit to preserve our planet it is worth a bit of effort to set up the necessary schedules

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Wakes up your computer from Standby or Hibernation
• Puts the computer into Standby or Hibernation Mode
• Allows for scheduling based on time, days, and weeks
• Runs programs on Startup or Shutdown/Hibernate
• Saves power for desktop PCs
• Saves battery life for laptop PCs

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

• Multiple Schedules
• Versatile
• Good Options
• Portable Program
• Save batch files from GUI
• Run from GUI or batch files/command line

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Not completely intuitive
• Help could be better structured
• Logic would be better to schedule shutdown first and then wakeup
• Shutdown to a time/day schedule
  (not x hours/mins/secs after wakeup)

So there are quite a few Cons but I could not find a better freeware alternative to fill the needs of having a schedule that could be varied over different days and have multiple instances of standby/wakeup within a day.

You also need to set your BIOS to handle “wakeup” events in S1 or S3 mode (S3 mode recommended as this is minimum power use)  Google BIOS S1 S3 to find suitable instructions on how to do this. There is a very good set of instructions available for a shareware product but it would be unfair to provide a link to these from a page reviewing a “competing” freeware product

More About What it Does in Detail:

Go to Page 2 for details and screenshots

Go to Page 3 for ProReviewer Summary

(see Page Navigation below)

Popularity: 24% [?]

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Pages: 1 2 3

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Freeware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.