I’m going to try out this piece of software, apparently it works very well. Especially for those with home networks and home/media servers. Made by Germans, so I’ll see how it goes on my desktop.
from the LightsOut Website.
LightsOut – The name says it all.
This Add-In is used to put a Windows Home Server into suspended mode or hibernation and resume on user defined events.
Description
To go to sleep, you can choose from several methods:
- On demand, when no more clients are active
- Based on a calendar, as a single action or repeated each weekday
- Or as a combination of both methods
You can define times, where the server has to be up and running:
- Using the calendar
- Based on the defined backup time
Wake up
A suspended or hibernated server can be resumed using a calendar event.
You can also install a small application on your client machines to wake up your server when needed.
Additional functionality
The Add-In visualizes the uptime of your client machines, your server and the backup time. So you can easily identify the
machine which puts the server into sleep.
Data integrity
To reduce the risk of data loss, the server is never put into sleep during an active backup operation or a backup cleanup.
You can define services, which are stopped on suspend and restarted after resume. The DriveExtenderMigrator always belongs to this list of services. Additional services like a mail server can be added.
Download from LightsOut: http://www.axonet.de/whs/LightsOutInstaller0.8.2.235.msi
Update: This only works on Windows Home Server, it does not work on a desktop operating system, XP, Vista or Windows 7.