I don't really have a Media Center on my edition of Vista (Business), but I do use sleep and hiberate quite a lot. Instead of power off, actually.

I have my Windows Media Center set to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity.  I built this PC to be very low-powered, so it only consumes about 2 watts in S3 sleep and about 50 watts when it's awake.  

This has worked really well for me so far.  Vista Windows Media Center wakes up right before a show starts to record and shuts it down after the commercial cutting is complete.

In addition, I watch all of my TV via an extender (Xbox 360), and the process of waking up the computer via the extender does add about 15 seconds to the startup time, but I can bare the difference for some extra power-saving.  

Mine is exactly like Zack's.

i had mine like zack & irish's until a recent rebuild & can't get it back there.  any tips?

/b.

I suppose it realy depends what other devices or services are dependant on the media center.

If it just extenders, then it should be ok to allow it to sleep as the extender will wake it up when it's needed. It adds about 15 seconds to the start up time, but I think it's worth it for the amount of power saved. Since upgrading to vista this has been a bit problematic (for me anyway) as some times I get the "Extender could not connect.." message. This adds another 10 seconds to start up! This worked flawlessly under Media Center XP 2005.

I know if ever I start using Webguide in a serious way from out side my house, then I will have to let it run 24/7. Same goes for if I start using home automation products. It realy depends.....

My <a href="http://www.techlifeweb.com/2008/04/05/media-server-project/">Vista Media Server</a> is designed for low power consumption as well. As far as power settings, I have it set to Balanced and turn off monitor. I have a RAID array so I am a little worried about shutting down the drives.

On my laptop, I use the sleep function. In fact it is one of my favorite features of Vista. The laptop is new and came with Vista so the hardware is designed to work correctly. I love it, close the lid and go and very very minimal start up at the new location.

I can't live without sleep mode!

I've recently lost a VMC PC to sleep mode, but I'm not ready to give it up yet.

While working on my latest setup, I created a task using Task Scheduler that automatically restarts my PC every morning at say 3am. This basically shelters me from the problems most people experience due to those nasty drivers because Vista still gets a chance to do a clean shut down.

I set my Vista media center PC to go to sleep after 30 minutes.  I don't use any extenders or the PVR functionality, so this works well for me.  SP1 got rid of the occasional problems I had with slow wake from sleep.

My VMC is set to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity.  It wakes up and goes to sleep very nicely.  I have my Harmony remote set to power-down the VMC PC.  The PC seems to be smart enough to only go to sleep if there's actually nothing going on.

I also disabled Hybrid Sleep, which writes the memory image to disk before sleeping in case power should be lost.  (My VMC PC is on a UPS so the risk of complete power-outage is small.  This way the machine goes to sleep in just a few seconds after hitting the Harmony off button, instead of about 20 seconds.  

The only issue I have is a result of there being only a power-toggle IR code, instead of  discrete IR codes to put the PC to sleep and wake it up.  During the 15 minutes that the PC is still awake after finishing some activity (such as recordsing) hitting the power-on button on the Harmony remote nicely powers-up all the other equipment but puts the PC to sleep.

My main VMC PC goes to sleep after 20 minutes the monitor however is set to never go to sleep as I found that also turned off the secondary TV monitor as well when watching Live TV. I have WOL configured on the wired network adapter so that the XBOX 360 MCX can wake the PC and connect an extender session. I also have a secondary VMC laptop and if I need to access media files stored on the main VMC PC, I have a WOL command line I run that wakes the main VMC PC up. This all works pretty well and for me is better than running the VMC PC 24/7 as I use to do in the past.

well i got it sorted, thankfully.  after the rebuild i was able to put it to sleep/wake it up with the remote, with minimal tweaking - it just wouldn't go to sleep on its own, after a recording, etc.

in the end it turned out to be the screensaver (aurora) preventing sleep.  i set it to "(none)" and voila - sweet sleepy silence.  i haven't yet tested other screensavers (directx vs. opengl 'savers?).

i haven't installed any drivers that weren't delivered via windows update, so i guess it's a problem with Microsoft's "official" driver for my card (ATI All-In-Wonder X600 Pro).  Everything else works fine tho, so I'm happy.

It's been a busy week this week. I have been looking at the HP HDX Dragon Entertainment PC I am giving...

I have my media centre set to go to S3 standby after just 3 minutes of inactivity.  That's to minimise the time spent running for no reason.  The machine goes into standby quickly at the end of recordings, torrent downloads, etc.

On its own, though, that wouldn't work well because it would shut down three minutes after the end of a film, for example, if you didn't do anything about it.  I use the 'Prevent auto sleep/hibernate' feature of my Ten Foot Launcher utility to prevent shutting down when we're watching.  The Launcher detects when you manually switch to standby and resets itself automatically so you don't have to remember to switch the feature off yourself.

The Launcher is available free from www.SeeITA.com/TF

It's very simple to program if you want to write your own utility.  Check out the SetThreadExecutionState(ES_SYSTEM_REQUIRED) Kernel32 API.  I call it every 30 seconds.  Works fine in both XP MCE and Vista.

Andy

Is  there any way to passby sleep mode when watching Video, I do not want to put the displayer on never shut down.

Thanks

Havent got to this point yet, been on the radar for a few months but not had time to do it, been full time encoding my extensive dvd collection to divx, this is not so bad on a quad xtreme, but sheer volume. Anyway ive now got 4tb ReadyNAS NV+ with good power profile running and thought i better do the Sleep on VMC, probably next weekend. Im using DMA2200 extender and adding a DSM750 when they launch in UK.

Anybody know a good thread where i can read about settings and the pitfalls to avoid with sleep?