I have never heard of a timer you can use to automatically turn on a computer.
There probably isn't such a thing. Why can you do that with a light fixture but not a computer.

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merle - vote yes for freedom of speech

I have never heard of a timer you can use to automatically turn on a computer.
There probably isn't such a thing. Why can you do that with a light fixture but not a computer.

Some mobo's can be set to power up after a power loss..

P.

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A light fixture is a relatively simple device. Its only design is to send electricity to burn a filament or other modern method of illumination. When you cut power, nothing bad happens other than you lose light.


A computer, on the other hand, is a far more complex and delicate device. Various components expect specific voltages to be regulated, and various OS functions and applications hold data in memory, which requires electricity to refresh the memory circuits to keep them from losing their content and you from losing your work.

In most cases, a sudden loss of power results in the average person losing data that is relatively unimportant, but more importantly an ungraceful shutdown can ruin the filesystem on the hard drive which can cause real problems down the road if left unchecked.

As has been said, you can have your computer power on during certain times of the day via the BIOS/UEFI, but it is strongly recommended that you use a graceful shutdown method to avoid sudden power loss to your system.

That is my question, can you turn on the computer automatically. You are saying you can in UEFI.

I was just reading my UEFI booklet with ASRock MB. It said "set it to 'by OS'".
(RTC Alarm Power On)

But when I query win7 it says nothing about being able to do that.

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merle - vote yes for freedom of speech

I have never heard of a timer you can use to automatically turn on a computer.
There probably isn't such a thing. Why can you do that with a light fixture but not a computer.

Computers have been able to do that for 15, maybe even 20, years now. The old 10-12 year Dell machines we had in our cubes at work had the function for that.
However not all manufactures implement the function. The ASRock manual for your newest system doesn't mention it for instance. They could have added it later in a BIOS/UEFI update, or just forgotten to mention it in the manual.

A work around if the BIOS does not support the function. Tell windows to sleep instead of power down. Then you can time when you want it to wake up. It is not as good a solution as having the MB handle it, but it can have your desired effect.

A third option if you have 1 machines on all the time. It to have it send a wake up command over the network to turn the others on.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

Task Scheduler can be used to wake up the computer from Standby or Hibernation to perform a specific task.

Thanks Hal,

And I had better shut up now before I reveal how little common sense I really have.

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merle - vote yes for freedom of speech

Thanks Hal,

And I had better shut up now before I reveal how little common sense I really have.

It's OK I think we already know. :P

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

Thanks Hal,

And I had better shut up now before I reveal how little common sense I really have.

It's OK I think we already know. :P

Ha,ha.. rightOn!

Except that the RTC Power On on the MB did just let me enable it and set it for 2am. in the freezing night so it will be toasty when I get up.

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merle - vote yes for freedom of speech

Four of my machines power down at noon on weekdays (using a Started Task) to avoid peak electricity rates. A BIOS setting automatically starts 3 of the 4 back up at 6:00 PM. (For some reason, I've never gotten it to work on the 4th one, even though I've tried to set it up to do so.)

Each BIOS calls the settings something slightly different, and I don't recall right now what mine are, but it should be something like BIOS Power-on or BIOS Boot. Mine allow me to specify a single boot time that will be in effect for whichever days of the week I select.

Yeah,
In the MB booklet it only mentioned working thru the OS, but when I went to the UEFI it actually let me enable it to be set right in the motherboard. I'll see in the morning whether or not it actually works. I shutdown at night thru the task manager.

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merle - vote yes for freedom of speech

Tell windows to sleep instead of power down.

I wouldn't use 'sleep' but instead 'hibernate'.

Sleep saves everything open to memory and then powers down to a low power mode. Lose power in this mode and you lose all programs and their state in memory.
Restarting will take mere seconds.

Hibernate saves everything open to the hard drive and then powers down to a low power mode. Lose power in this mode and nothing much happens, you can even move the unpowered PC to another room for several days if need be.
Restarting will take 30 seconds to a minute, depending on how much was open, hard drive speed, CPU speed and programs trying to run immediately upon resuming. This does mean that BOINC will cause the computer to restart slower.

Restarting from hibernation is at least faster than starting from cold.

There is also Hibernation Sleep which saves the state both to memory and to the hard drive. When you now lose power, the computer can be restarted from the image on the hard drive.

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Then there is the low tech method. Plug the computer into a UPS. Plug the UPS into a timer. The UPS will tell the computer to shut down before it loses battery. Tell the computer to wake on power on. This also allows CRT's, printers, etc. to also turn off and on. Of course you may have a nasty loud alarm on the UPS beeping until it runs out of battery.

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Another low-tech bodge would be to set the machines BIOS to always boot when the power comes on. It can usually be set to "Off", "Last State" or "Always Boot"

Then connect it to a simple plug in timer.

Now the clever part would be to schedule the PC to shut down 1 hour before the timer actually goes off. So the PC will already be off when the power is switched off.

Next day, the power is turned on again and the PC boots up again.

Might be a workable solution for PCs that don't have a Startup time option in the BIOS.