ACPI, XP & Wake on alarm

  • Thread starter Thread starter Alister Tevlin
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A

Alister Tevlin

Can any one help?

I want to use the "wake on alarm" feature, how do I do this wioth XP.

I tried a fresh install without ACPI but that caused more problems.

Clint

Sydney, Australia
 
Alister,

Perhaps a question for an XP news group, but...

If you are referring to the bios option where you can set a time of day for
the system to boot, then this should work regardless of the OS installed
since it is a bios option.

For it work, you need to shutdown your computer, but not switch the power
off at the PSU / mains. If you place the computer in Standby (or hybernate),
it can't work as the OS is still running and the bios doesn't get a look
see. If the machine is in standby there are no doubt share ware utilities
that will wake it up at set times.

If the above does not apply, what motherboard, make, model and bios version?

- Tim
 
Thanks for the reply Tim.

The board is an Asus A7V133-C (c2001).

The manual says that this function will not work if the system is powered
down by an OS that has ACPI support enabled , ie Win 98.

I thought that since ACPI has been around for a while, someone might have
written the routine to enable this function via XP because it's a useful
function.

If anyone knows how to do this please let me know.

Cheers,

Clint.
 
"Alister Tevlin" said:
Thanks for the reply Tim.

The board is an Asus A7V133-C (c2001).

The manual says that this function will not work if the system is powered
down by an OS that has ACPI support enabled , ie Win 98.

I thought that since ACPI has been around for a while, someone might have
written the routine to enable this function via XP because it's a useful
function.

If anyone knows how to do this please let me know.

Cheers,

Clint.
Click to expand...

My interpretation of that statement, is that when ACPI is running,
then ACPI "owns" the RTC alarm resource, and not the BIOS. It is
then up to the OS to provide an API to make the waking function
available to the user. When Windows is shutting down the system,
it checks the schedule, to see when is the next time that the
system needs to be awaken, and it writes the RTC block just
before the system is shutdown. If the BIOS wasn't told to stop
using that block, there would be a conflict between Windows
using the resource, and the BIOS using the resource.

I've never used it, but try looking into the "Scheduled Tasks"
control panel.

HTH,
Paul
 
Have you considered using STR/Hibernate and the task scheduler? The latter
will not only wake the system at your desired time but also run whatever
programs you wish then timeout back to a STR/Hibernate state. Far superior
to that BIOS feature. This happens at 4:00AM every Sunday morning here to
run NAV on this system (Saturday morning on another). I've been doing this
ever since XP came out and it works flawlessly. Should work on other Win OSs
too. The above assumes that you were going to use the BIOS feature to boot
into Windows and not some other OS.
 
Note that hibernate (a must with notebooks) on a desktop is theoretically
superior to STR since it mimics a true off state better. Its only downside
is the slower resumption. Nevertheless, I suspect most of us, like me, use
STR instead.
 
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