I’ve been running an application on my home Win7 PC for the past month called SetPower. As the name hints, it is a power management application. I know what you are thinking, Win7 and most other modern operating systems already have power management built in. SetPower expands the power scheme scheduling on a Windows PC (Xp, Vista, 7).
After installing, a SetPower applet appears in the control panel. From this applet, you customize your power schedules. My goals were to 1: wake up the PC when I wake up, and have it available if I need to check email etc. 2: keep my PC powered on during working hours on weekdays. 3: have the PC available in the evenings, but let it go to sleep if it is not used frequently. 4: put the PC quickly to sleep when I go to bed to save power. 5: optimize the availability of the PC on the weekends when I may or may not be using it.
To accomplish these goals, I created a schedule for every week day to wake the computer at 6:45 am, have the display turns off in 5 minutes, and the PC sleeps after 30 minutes idling. At 9:00 am, (if it is not already awake) wake up the PC and set a power scheme to turn the display off in 1 minute, and never allow it to sleep or hibernate. For the evenings, I created another schedule, this time activating at 6:00 pm. The display turns off in 10 minutes, and the computer sleeps in 1 hour, and once SetPower applied this scheme, keep it up for only 10 minutes (assuming I am not home from work yet). At bedtime, the final power scheme takes effect at 12:00 am: the PC goes to sleep after 2 minutes idling.
Now for the weekends, the only changes made for the day time schedule was to power the PC on later, at 8:00 am (I like to sleep in a little), with the display turning off in 15 minutes, and the PC sleeps after 2 hours of idling.
I can always wake my PC from sleep by moving the mouse or hitting a key on the keyboard to override the settings. This is handy when I am up late and can’t sleep or home sick during the week. I know this may not be a solution for everyone, but it works for me.
UPDATED: I have since stopped using SetPower. I no longer need to keep my desktop powered on since I can now use LogMeIn’s remote power on feature. I also noticed that SetPower kept duplicating at least one of the power schemes several times with the identical setup.
