A niggling sleep problem fixed (but not by me)

This post is about a problem I tweeted about sometime ago but no amount of searching has located that tweet. I’ll start by detailing the hardware that went into our HTPC:

• Motherboard: ASUS P5LD2-VM DH
• CPU: Intel Celeron D 352 3.2GHz
• HDD: Maxtor DiamondMax10 SATA2 300GB
• RAM: 2GB of memory (Corsair TWIN2X1024A-6400)
• Case: SilverStone LC11S-300
• Graphics: XFX GeForce 7300GT 256MB DDR2 PCIE (now removed as you will read)
• Tuner: Hauppauge Nova-T-500 Dual DVB-T PCI (moved to the Windows Home Server)

When we first started using Windows Media Center, the version that came with Vista, this machine sat under our TV and served its purpose without too many issues including going to sleep and waking up for recordings or whenever we wanted to use it.

Then in 2008, after swiping my visitors badge at the Server/SQL/Visual Studio 2008 product launch in Birmingham, I won an Xbox360 so we switched to using that as an Extender and moved the HTPC into a back room (it had always been just slightly too noisy and we also wanted the TV in a location which had no TV points within easy reach). At that time I turned off sleep because, when setting up an Extender, Vista prompts you to turn on “Away Mode” to ensure the machine is always available for use.

Last year I got into Twitter where I started getting more involved with other HTPC users and Windows Media Center MVP’s. This is a great community filled with really helpful and knowledgeable people. I learned the Xbox360 could send the “magic packet” required to wake up a sleeping HTPC which meant that there was no need to keep the machine on 24/7 anymore. When Windows 7 was released I decided to try and re-configure the HTPC to sleep and this was when I ran into problems. I discovered the HTPC would not enter sleep correctly, it was doing everything right but the machine wouldn’t actually power down. I knew it was partly working because when I pulled the power cable out and replaced it the machine restored from the hibernation file. I tried removing the now redundant graphics card (since no monitor or TV is connected), to just use the onboard Intel graphics, but that didn’t work. I even did a full CMOS reset on the motherboard in case I’d changed a configuration setting which was causing the issue. In the end I discovered a notice in the Windows 7 “Action Center” telling me that the computers BIOS was causing conflicts with sleep. Since there were no BIOS updates available and no money to replace the motherboard I just gave up. I should add here that the HTPC could not be shutdown correctly either and the power always stayed on after the OS had finished shutting down.

Now, digressing slightly, I’ve spent the last week or so reading about and playing around with DVBLogic’s new network tuner software and succesfully moved our Nova-T-500 tuner from a desktop PC and installing it in our Windows Home Server (WHS). I then decided to move the tuner from the HTPC and put it into the WHS to fully switch to network tuners. Last night I shutdown the HTPC ready for the hardware changes and to my surprise it turned off. This is something it hasn’t done for months. I carried on with the plan to move the tuner into the WHS and then re-configured the HTPC to use the network tuners.

When all the hardware and software changes were done I got the HTPC running again and tested live TV and also that I could record which all worked as per my expectations from the tests I’d performed with the desktop PC. We are now able to enjoy live TV on my netbook, the desktop, and the HTPC using the pool of 4 tuners on the WHS. With that I then tested out sleep by pressing the power button on the HTPC, which is set to send the HTPC to sleep, and after some disk activity (I’ve got hybrid sleep turned on so it saves the contents of RAM to disk in case of a power failure while in S3 sleep) the power light started flashing to indicate the S3 sleep state. As I said before this hadn’t worked no matter how much I tried before. I then went into the living room and pressed the “Media Center” button on the Xbox360 remote control and after a slightly longer wait I was presented with the Windows Media Center interface. I’m ashamed to admit but the techie inside me was grinning at this point. I retried the test and again it worked although this time the Xbox360 didn’t connect the first time, even though the HTPC had woken up, and I had to try again by pressing the button on the remote once more.

The next test was to just leave things alone and let the HTPC go to sleep naturally and see if it would wake up for a scheduled recording. This happened today and everything worked perfectly including recording using the network tuners. This has also worked again this evening with other shows that are scheduled to record. I can only imagine what has changed to suddenly make this work, I don’t make changes to the HTPC if I can help it as we rely on it for all our TV, but it would seem that sometimes the best way to fix something is to do nothing at all. [:D]

There is a great guide on Missing Remote here for configuring your Windows 7 PC for sleep. I’ve included screen shots below of the sleep settings that I am using on our HTPC but I’m unable to capture the BIOS settings. The first thing to check is your network adaptor hardware settings.

In “Device Manager” look at the Power Management settings for your network card.

The remaining power options you can get to by pressing the “Start” menu and typing “power” into the search box.

There is no seperate sleep button on our HTPC so you might also see “When I press the sleep button”

With the “Power Options” settings open select “Change plan settings” next to the active plan (Balanced in my case) and then “Change advanced power settings”.

These are the advance settings. You can turn off hybrid sleep to speed up the transition to S3 sleep (since contents of RAM are not written to disk)

Scroll down for these other advanced options. I choose “Allow the computer to sleep” because media is on the WHS.