Steve Glendinning

One of the features of Vista that I really like is it’s “sleep”.  Unlike XP, which usually used S1 sleep, Vista puts the system into the much lower power S3 state.  On my Core2Quad workstation, this takes the power usage down to 3W (from ~62W running at idle).  To put this into perspective, the power usage when the system is fully shut down is ~2W, but wakeup is MUCH quicker than a full boot.

Vista allows you to configure which hardware sources can wake up the system from sleep, so for example you can enable or disable Wake On Lan.  It also allows software to schedule a wakeup, and Media Centre is one such beast.  Ever since I started playing with Media Centre, the system has randomly woken up from sleep (and not returned to sleep afterwards), which kinda defeats the purpose of sleep!

It’s quite easy to find out the source of the most recent wakeup (powercfg /lastwake), but this lists all software sources as “RTC”.  It doesn’t identify *which* process (or scheduled task) was responsible.

I found one solution over at thegreenbutton (thanks to mxcrowe):

If you do this, your computer will not auto-wake for any reason (s/w reason – I suppose WOL etc. will still work).  This info was given to me by another poster here on the Green Button:

1. Open a CMD prompt
2. powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_sleep bd3b718a-0680-4d9d-8ab2-e1d2b4ac806d 0
3. powercfg -setdcvalueindex scheme_current sub_sleep bd3b718a-0680-4d9d-8ab2-e1d2b4ac806d 0
4. powercfg -setactive scheme_current

This changes and applies a new power scheme that stops the machine from being woken from sleep. In my case, I have a desktop system and probably didn’t need to set the DC option, but I did both anyway.

Here are some fantastic blog posts and resources I’ve come across in the last week:

• “Madduck” posted two extremely detailed posts on using the git revision control tool. Here is the first, and here is the second. They’re specific to debian packaging, but they’re the kind of worked examples I find extremely useful.  I think git has a lot of potential, especially with its excellent svn integration.
• Chris Lamb posted his top 10 shell shortcuts (bash, zsh etc) . I only knew a few of these, they could save me some keyboard time.
• ScottGu posted yet another useful collection of .net resources. Particularly handy is the C# coding standard guidelines from IDesign.