Is there a auto power on device?

[thymej]

If you dont want to leave your HTPC on ,what do you all do to auto power your HTPC on to record? Or do you just leave it on in sleep mode? It there a auto-power devices for PCs?

ThymeJ

[redwudz]

I just leave mine on 24/7. But you can set it in BIOS to turn on at a particular time of day. I also have it set to turn on when I hit any key on the keyboard. Also a BIOS setting.

From there, you should be able to use a program to turn it on from a schedule, but it would likely have to be in standby mode for that to work.

If you wanted a purely external way to power up from a cold start, you could hook the power switch leads on the computer to a relay in parallel with your existing power switch leads and use an external timing circuit to pulse the relay once to switch on the computer. The 'start' pulse to the relay could come from about any device or electronic timer. The computer power switch is just a logic level switch, the motherboard actually turns on the power supply to start the computer.

[jsmithepa]

There is no need to get fancy. Sleep mode works as intended and fine. Be sure u configure PC to go APCI S3, Suspend in Windows' parlance, rather than standby and it will draw very little power when asleep. Just be sure your IR remote has a way to wake it up when u need to.

[joeg04]

Most tower and desktop PCs have a timer for automatic booting that can be set in BIOS.

[yoda313]

There is no need to get fancy. Sleep mode works as intended and fine

Yeah I found that out by accident. I had left my regular xp desktop in standby mode by mistake just before I was set to record a show. Then I realized I didn't leave it on and went to check and it was recording in the background! I have a hdtv fusion 3 capture card. I don't know if this feature is common to all capture cards or not or whether its strictly a feature of windows that will make all cards do that.

Worth testing. Then you can simply leave your tv/monitor off and put the pc in standby mode and it will do the recording on its own without you doing anything besides letting it stay powered on in standby mode. Give it a try

[dj4monie]

Mine goes into Stand By and ATI MMC fires up every Tues at 6pm PST to record Overhaulin cause my arse is still at work and usually the latest eps premieres at that time.

Because of some funky WINDOWS error Hibernate wasn't working right and I would get the Blue Screen of Confusion.

I have since turned it off and I won't bother solving it until its time to take out this 60GB Windows is on and replace it with one of the 2 WG Caviar 320GB drives I have sitting here -