Is your HTPC On all the time?

Mine is on 24/7

Has been on since i built it in December 2006. Hasnt been switched ofg longer then 15mins and has had few restarts for updates.

When i want to watch somthing just change TV to HDMI get the wirless mouse and enjoy

Mines on 24/7 (generally) but that's because I can't get standby working right :P

You don't need to leave it on all the time though, if you enable S3 Standby. The machine will go to sleep when it's inactive, then wake up if it needs to record something (or you wake it up to play).

24x7 for mine.

My VistaMCE goes to S3 stand-by after 30 minutes of in-activity and automatically wakes up 5 minutes before the next recording. It's great because the machine goes silent, all HDDs and fans turn off but it only takes 5 seconds to wake up, I love the feature. I have seen lots of machines that can't go to sleep properly but somehow mine works fine without any extra configuration, lucky I guess.

I do have 1 problem right now with sleep. If the machine goes to sleep on the MCE main menu it will wake up on the main menu but with wierd video corruption. The Start-bar and desktop backgound show through on the bottom and right side of the screen. I have to exit MCE and start it again to correct the problem. Sucks but the workaround is easy enough.

Mine isn't really a full blown HTPC, just using it to capture HD OTA. Just an over-complicated VCR. It comes out of suspend when it's time to record, when it's done recording the application closes and in 10 minutes the power settings kick in, and goes back into suspend. Of course I have it on when playing the captured files.

FWIW, I measured the amp draw in suspend, it was about 0.6A. When the PC is not suspended it draws about 0.75A. When the PC is booting and the disks are spinning up it's doing about 1.0A.

HTH

Brian

Mine are on 24/7 unless I take them down for maintenance. One has been up 220 straight days, the other was up 200 straight days before I was doing some work on it last week.

One of mine stays on all the time because it is also a fileserver, and webserver. The other one stays on because I have a faulty card that stops my computer from POSTing 9 out ot 10 times and I don't feel like replacing it . Plus both also run other jobs, like transcoding and commercial detection. It's just easier to leave them on. I have them hooked up to UPSs

But depending on your situation, you certainly don't need to leave them on 24/7.

Sleep causes problems on most mobo's and I think it does on mine, unfortunately..

It's brought my power bill up quite a bit.. $377 with a/c and 3 computers on all the time.

Mine's on 24/7 although I do boot it automagically at 2am every night. Not sure it needs it but I have 20 applications running most of the time, and any one leaking a small amount of memory would cause problems that auto reboots mask effectively.

on 24/7, although its just a mp3 server & pic viewer.

i have a small mobo w/embedded processor. i designed system to have low draw & run cool. hdd is a laptop drive & vid card is passively cooled.

I am using Vista for two of my HTPC and I force them to S3 mode when I don't use them. I use MCE remote control and you turn it to S3 mode just like you turn off any appliance. It saves energy and also all fans are off. It certainly extend the HTPC's life since all fans as well as HDD has mechnical parts and are subject to fail over time.

Certainly it will wake up when it is asked to record OTA programs. It then goes to sleep after 30 minutes no activities.

I did have some problem in configuring Vista to S3 mode and I figured it out. I am using EVGA 680i LT and XFX 650i Ultra for two HTPCs. I found that the following default setting in Windows prevent the machine from entering standby mode.

- 'Allow this device to wake up system' in Power Management tab of the properties dialog box for mouse device.

ABove setting is turned on by default. After I turn it off I was able to force the system to S3 mode by pressing the 'Power' button on the case or 'Power' button on the remote. Of course you need to configure the power setting to do this.

24/7 since She Who Must Be Obeyed streams music from it via MC Extender and I could never get it to wake up reliably from S3 using the extender.

S3 sleep mode for all my pc's, cept for my file server running WHS.

- Josh

Why? Save power and turn it off when you don't need it.

It will with S3 sleep mode, S3 is practically off, just uses enough power to do simple tasks, such as waking the pc up for scheduled recordings.

I can also turn the pc on with the remote, which is great so you just hit the power on button from the remote and it wakes the pc up.

only down side I had was EDID issues between the video card and the projector, say my projector was off, and the pc woke up to do a recording then the next time I would go to wake the pc up, the video would not come back on, the video card would loose edid sync with the projector so I had to get this device: http://www.monoprice.com/products/pr...seq=1&format=2

and that solved my video sync issues after that.

- Josh

0.6 amps? I think that's 66 watts. In suspend mode. That doesn't seem right - shouldn't it be a LOT less than that?

--Don