Auto Standby your Computer
Last updated: Jun 23, 2008There are a few different states you can put your computer into when you are not using it. If you don’t run any other services that require networking I recommend turning your computer off via standby. It will essentially put your computer into a ultra low power state only using enough power to keep the current state in ram. If you have a significant amount of ram 2gb or more you can easily put your computer in and out of standby mode in a matter of seconds.
Why Standby?
Many people shy away from turnin their computers off because of long boot times and startup load times. Even after removing startup programs computers will sometimes boot slow. However, if you turn your computer off you can reap some huge savings on energy costs. My computer pulls about 280 watts when ideling. Not even counting the monitor. You can save several dollars a month not running your computer 24⁄7.
With standby we can essentially shut our computers down without the inconvience of slow boot and load times. My computer can enter a hibernated state in 2.45 seconds and recover back to a normal state in ~10.5 seconds. On machines with less ram you will have significantly more load time.
Making a standby shortcut
To make a shortcut for standby go to start click run and type notepad. Then copy the following code and paste it in your text file.
RUNDLL32.EXE PowrProf.dll,SetSuspendState
After pasting the code click file save as. Then navigate to your desktop and save the file as, “standby.bat” (include the quotes). If you forget the quotes you will have a file called standby.bat.txt.
Once you create the bat file you can put your computer in standby mode by just double clicking the newly created bat file.
Setting up a scheduled standby
Once you create your .bat file you may wish to put your computer in standby at a secific time. Maybe 5:30pm (when you leave) on a work computer or 12:00am (when you go to bed) on your home computer.
You can then set it to standby at a set time through windows task scheduler.
Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks
From there just click through the wizard, select the bat file, and then choose an appropriate time for standby to begin.
You can also turn on automatic standby when your computer goes to idle through the power settings in the control panel, but I don’t prefer this method as I may have a download going when I am not using my computer and I don’t want it to be interupted. I find the scheduled standby task is best for me.
Need to print shipping labels on your site?
Checkout my product RocketShipIt for simple easy-to-use developer tools for UPS™ FedEx™ USPS™ and more.