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S3 Standby State Done Right
For Earth Day, Cameron Butterfield has written in with a pointer to his article on how to get your Windows PC into S3 sleep, and why you want to. It covers the question of how to take advantage of this extremely low-power mode even when your machine is an "always on" file server, remote desktop, or VNC server.
Great for Windows users... but what are the options to set up a Linux system to reduce power usage and fan noise when idle?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It doesn't seem to be a hot topic because I couldn't google a definitive page. There were lots of pages for individual computers or distros though.
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/power/ ... The exact file on my system is states.txt but it also seems to exist on other distros as suspend.txt
The documentation is probably on your own computer at:
Windows XP will often times not give s3 suspend as an option even when turned on in BIOS. But with Microsofts dumppo.exe utility you can force it to use an S3 or S4 state. ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/products/Oemtest/v1.1/WOST est/Tools/Acpi/dumppo.exe To force it to S3, run this under command prompt "dumppo admin minsleep=s3"
yes it will.
Or it does for me. Even if the computer is alone on the router. It seems my router occasionally broadcasts something and wakes up all my computers.
I've switched to using the magic packet alternative. The only problem is that since my server PC is behind my router, I have to SSH into the router and sent the magic packet from there. ICKY.
I hear other routers (mine is a Linksys WRT54GS) will let you WOL remotely. Normally, you just send your magic packet to the router and set up the router to convert it to a broadcast.
If I remember correctly, a magic packet is just a packet with the correct header and the client's MAC address broadcast to the network.
I just pooped your party.
often, my computers cant be put to sleep because theyre transferring files (over aim, bit torrent, you name it.. every app according to its need).
Ive noticed all companies, including apple, whose products i use, are giving you only a black and white choice. you either have the computer awake or its fully asleep.
i'd like to have a low power transfer mode, where the cpu is reduced (to 1 core at say 500 mhz), the monitor is turned off, and as much memory as possible is dedicated to the apps which are doing intensive file reads/writes. this will allow the hard drives to be used less by caching the files in ram and pulsing the hard disk.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Under MCE, I use the MCE Standy Tool. MCE has a bad habit of waking up to record a show and then not returning to standby afterwards. This can result in the computer staying on all day instead of just 1/2 hour to record a small show. The Standby Tool has features to help MCE handle power management in better ways then Windows default methods. It makes me wonder why Microsoft couldn't get things to work as smoothly as this 3rd party software. http://www.xs4all.nl/~hveijk/mst/indexe.htm
* Power bills are generally measured in kilowatt hours or "kW/h"s. Power rates might be as much as $0.12 per kW/h
* Our total cost of having the computer on 24/7 for the month in this scenario would be as follows:
*
That said, it is a good article on how to keep the "instant-on" without using excess power.
Does that mean my PC costs one-quarter of what he calculates?
Guys! You found each other!
Shouldn't you guys exchange phone numbers or something?
Welcome to the exciting new world of UGC.
Slightly off tangent, but hibernation (S4) fails in WinXP SP2 if you have more than 1GB of RAM.
Works just fine for me. Probably because I installed the udpate mentioned in the resolution section of the article sometime last year.
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
Oh yeah.
Bill Gate's memo
That's an interesting email from 1999. Myself, I've been known to send emails to the tone of "how can we prevent the competition from leeching on our multi-million dollar R&D investment with our technology partners", but OK.
Would you like to point me to the follow up email from Eric Rudder that says "Hi Bill - As you requested, we've made the ACPI extensions specific to Windows so no one else can implement them. Cheers!" I can't seem to find it.
Oh, wait - here's ACPIfor Linux and ACPI for FreeBSD. Indeed, here's a quote from the WP entry:
Now, ACPI has its shortcomings. It's complicated. It might not be your ideal of a standard. But it is an open standard, which Linux indeed implements. It might be broken in some ways in Linux as it is in Windows, but implemented it is. It's an important standard because it takes hardware out of the equation, which is important for a general OS that's supposed to support a wide range of it.
I still use APM for the most part
Really? That's also a Microsoft-defined standard (along with Intel):
Is that standard "shit" as well? And if you all these standards from Microsoft are "shit", then why do you use them at all? You use Linux, right? Why don't you come up with your own standard and give it to the free software world so they can stop using all these "shit" open standards that Microsoft has bothered to make open for anyone to use? Which reminds me, I'd love to see that other email about ACPI I mentioned. Thanks.
powercfg -a
Works for both XP and Vista. Tells you what's available and what's not (S1, S2, S3,...) Vista tells you why something isn't support.
Got info from this page