How in the Tech

Wake a sleepy PC on your schedule with WakeupOnStandBy

By Adam Myers ⋅ March 3, 2010 ⋅ Tags: System Administration, Windows

The modern world, by and large, are quite conscious of energy consumption and some of the wastefulness that exists. Regardless of which side of the go green initiative you stand, it’s hard to argue against their not existing at least some unnecessary inefficiencies or waste.

A potential source of an increased electricity consumption is the abundance of computers in the house; many households have more than one computer – a concept rather foreign even just a few years ago. While all modern PCs have the capability of slipping into a low-power consumption state, like stand-by or hibernation, not everyone does.

For some, the function of their computer does not allow for any time offline – perhaps a print or file server as an example. Still others may have background tasks that occur while they are away from the computer – tasks that otherwise would interfere with the performance of their computer. It’s quite commonplace to perform disk defrags, full anti-virus scans, or backups when the PC isn’t actively being used; such as throughout the night.

If you are energy conscious you may be at a crossroads here as not all tasks can awake a computer from stand-by. While utilizing Task Scheduler in Windows, it is possible to wake the PC it’s not at all user-friendly. Instead, I suggest you look at WakeUpOnStandBy – which does just as the name suggests. If their exists a few tasks that need to take place routinely the application can be configured on a schedule to execute those tasks, even if the PC is sleeping. After completion, WakeUpOnStandBy can then put the PC back into it’s dream state.

With WakeUpOnStandBy I can have my PC wake-up in the early morning and download all the podcasts recently released, that way they are ready to be sync to my portable device first thing in the morning. What are you using it for?

Download WakeUpOnStandBy