Hey, I don't know if this is well know or not but I found something that -may- or may not be helpful when playing last night.

Being an MCE'er like the rest of us here i always prefer to standby my machine so it can record, so having received my Vista in the post (next day delivery) I fiddled with several hours before hitting standby ... time for bed. The screens went off, fans still going ... darn .. it's the MCe 2005 problem all over again.

So, I remembered the dumppo and got it from here, tried it out, doesn't work, it just isnt allowed by vista to change the states.

I decided to check out the power management and found some settings;

• Balanced
• Power Saving
• Performance

Mine was set to performance, to keep processor and everything at full power.

I set it to Power saving and hit standby, system went into full S3 standby and resumed again just as easily.

Now, each setting has a "customise" link under it so you can change -everything- about the power saving. So, I'm guessing that there is some way we can set the "Performance" mode so that we can standby it to S3 when we want to.

As a final note, dumppo registered the same minsleep=s1, maxsleep=s4 - hibernate. No matter what these settings where set to so I'm guessing it's obselete as far as Vista goes.

Hope that helps someone and maybe someone could make something useful out of the info and post it back here. Good day.

Whoooaaaa, be careful with that Power saving setting. I've just tried it on my main machine as I have exactly the problem you described. it didn't change anything, but I did notice the hard disk thrashing about, so I wondered if some service was active. I could resume from sleep again, so i had to pwer down and restart. My machine was extremely sluggish almost catatonic.

When eventually I did have the power options redisplayed I found, as I thought, that my minimum was 5% and somehow my machine was running at that speed.  I'm sure you're on to something, so back to the experiments. I need a good thing to happen to me today.

[no joy so far]

It seems to work fine for me, PC will write to the disc (it's a hybrid standby, designed for laptops so it can suspend to disk on some sort of occasion?! But anyway, sure my standby and everything works in Power saving mode but performance isn't the same because my computer is running on a low power sort of mode. Getting the standby functionality while at the same time being able to run you computer at full power would be nice. I'll have a fiddle with the settings when I can stop trying to get my front panel USB2 ports to be just that. They will only do USB1 for some reason right now and it's driving me mental.

Be careful with dumppo--It's unsupported on any version of Windows and many of the APIs it uses to change power policy have been deprecated for Vista.

Changing to Power Saver shouldn't change the behavior of Sleep, Hybrid Sleep or Hibernate on the machine, other than the idle timeouts are shorter.

When you pressed the sleep button, but the fans and such stayed on, 3 things could have happened:

1.) The computer went into S1 (this is like S3, only with the fans on and it consumes almost as much power as running).

2.) The computer went into Away Mode (was there a recording going on, or had you started to record live TV?).

3.) The computer tried to go to sleep, but couldn't because some driver is preventing sleep from completing.

Here's how to work around each of these issues.

1.) You don't want to use S1--it consumes probably 50-60W on most machines and the fans and HDDs are left on.  You can check to see if the computer is using S1 using the inbox "PowerCfg.exe" tool.  To see which sleep states are available, run:

C:\>powercfg.exe /a
The following sleep states are available on this system: Standby ( S3 ) Hibernat
e Hybrid Sleep
The following sleep states are not available on this system:
Standby (S1)
        The system firmware does not support this standby state.
Standby (S2)
        The system firmware does not support this standby state.

C:\>

The key is to make sure that in the first list ("following sleep states are available"), S3 is listed.  It's OK if both S1 and S3 are there, but not OK if it's only S1.  If only S1 is avaialble, go into BIOS and switch it to S3 or S1/S3.

As long as S3 is available, Windows will not go into S1 when you try to put the machine to sleep.

2.)  By deafult, Vista will go into Away Mode when you press the sleep button if there is a recording in progress and the computer is on AC power.  This happens because there isn't a way for media center to prevent the sleep transition when you press the sleep button, like it could in XP.  So, media center enables away mode when there is a recording, and your computer will look like it went to sleep, but it'll really still be running--fans, CPU, HDD, everyhing--it'll all be on except video will be blanked and audio muted.

If you don't ever want Away Mode, you can disable it using these instructions.  But, I think you'll want the default behavior, especially because this allows the machine to stay on when you press the sleep button, but a recording is in progress.

To allow/disallow Away Mode system-wide, use these PowerCfg commands:

Allow Away Mode on AC power:

powercfg -setacvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_SLEEP 25dfa149-5dd1-4736-b5ab-e8a37b5b8187 1

powercfg -setactive SCHEME_CURRENT

Disallow Away Mode on AC power:

powercfg -setacvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_SLEEP 25dfa149-5dd1-4736-b5ab-e8a37b5b8187 0

powercfg -setactive SCHEME_CURRENT

Keep in mind that if you change these settings, they only change for the currently active power plan (e.g., "Balanced" or "High Performance" (SCHEME_CURRENT maps to the currently active plan).  Also, if you disallow away mode, it can not ever be used, even if an application such as media center or media sharing requests it.  When you press the sleep button, the machine will go to sleep, regardless of if there is a recording going on at the time.

3.) There are still some issues with drivers.  The old advice is still good: get the latest BIOS, video and tuner drivers for your machine.  You can also try disabling Hybrid Sleep and seeing if you have better success.  Also, if your machine hangs on the way to sleep or resuming, you can let it sit for ~10 minutes in that state and it may bluescreen.  Then, when you restart the system you should get the prompt to upload data to Microsoft, and there may be a response with an updated driver. 

Hope that helps,

Pat Stemen [MSFT]

Interestingly, I discovered last night that my system was actually going to sleep(i was being impatient) but was taking a good 2 minutes after screen blanking and so i was assuming it had hung, I have tried disabling hybrid mode and it still takes just a long, same goes for coming up from sleep, it takes a good 40-60 seconds before i'm back at the login screen.

This is significantly longer than my 1-3 seconds that were on MCE2005, is this supposed to be an acceptable standard for vista? or am I just waiting on improved drivers?

It would be nice to know how to tone down the secutiry preventing my USB pendrive CD-ROM partition from activating then i can safely say everything is working.

Thanks for all that info Pat, however I am getting absolutely nowhere with this.

I can say with certainty that I have s3 enabled, both in the BIOS and via the powercfg command you mentioned.

With VTM ui inactive
I can confirm that my machine will shutdown completely, fans, power light et al from the start menu.
I can confirm that my machine will restart from the start menu

So Vista is able to turn off the machine.

In whatever mode my machine goes into with a sleep command, eithe from the menu or the remote, the screen closes and I think th hd(s) click off, there is the sound of something clicking off, but I'm nt certain.

In this mode I do occasionally see a hd light (front panel) flash.I have waited and the machine stays on.

I have had the situation where pressing the power button on the front of the machine has woken the machine and then it has recycled and come up with the bsd message, but I haven't been able to repeat this at will.

I can confirm that there is no recording or any other scheduled activity going on that I am aware of.

The problem with the drivers issue is that who will take responsibility for this. Is it a MS issue, is it a mobo issue, a video card issue, a tv card issue????

What is the common feature between machines that have the problem? So please post your issues here so we can see.

This is a showstopper for me  :(

I have now tried the setting where I can assign hibernate to the power button. This has the same effect as my pseudo sleep. Only way out is to depress the power switch for 4 seconds to allow a total shutdown.

I can fairly safely say that in my cae atleast this isnt tv card related, I removed my TV cards (which are for sale if anyone wants them for MCE) as they are not yet supported in Vista an i'm impatient. Removing them has had no effect whatsoever. The rest of my Specs you can see from the sig, all using microsoft standard drivers. (until nvidia release a proper forceware)

I'm so glad that the tv cards don't seem to be the problem, I was dreading having to pull my machine out from all the other boxes and start pulling cards - it's a rats nest in there and I might get bitten.

Strange isn't it that we have totally different mobos and yet the same kind of issue - can you wake your up from the remote?

EDIT: Sorry mate, I'm getting confused here, I think I'm hijacking your thread a bit. Our problems are related but aren't quite the same are they? Apologies.

Strangely, that's the one thing I havn't tried yet, but don't forget, it has to be in hybrid sleep mode because none hybrid is hibernate so it really is off.

I have just tested that and mine will sleep and wake from the remote. Only if the system is in hybrid sleep though, like i said, none hybrid is hibernate so it's not powered up.

Thanks for checking :)

When vista goes to the new sleep mode, does it wakes the computer up for a scheduled recording, or I should put it back into the old S3-standby mode? 

My computer now does sleep mode beautifully.  I put it to sleep, and awake, using the remote.  But of course I would like to know for sure weather it will wake the computer up to record, and back to sleep again after a recording.  I haven`t test it yet, I simply took it for granted...I can`t belive I`ll have the same headaches I had setting up standby mode with MCE 2005...

Say I go away for a weekend.  Will my weekend recording be made if I leave the computer on the new hybrid sleep mode?  The first poster seem to imply that I will not, which I find strange that MS would choose this as the default behavior for a machine where you can schedule 14 days of recording (or more).

This is just some general Vista info that I have figured out from trying and reading.

The new Vista Sleep feature is a stand-by/hibernate combo. That's why after going into sleep the computer still has fans running whille it prepares for hibernation (writin all memory to disk).

The computer still only goes to "hot stand-by" BUT incase of a powerfaliure the machine will boot as if it were in hibernation (I tried this by putting it to sleep and then yanking out the power cord).

I my case I couldn't get the sleep to function properly right after installing Vista. Mine only went to S1 no matter what I did. But just recently there was an update for Vista for the Quick Resume feature found on Viiv enabled hardware. After the update was downloaded from Windows Update, it works perfectly. When in sleep mode, it will automatically start up for any scheduled recording. I have yet to make it go back to sleep though, but I have not messed with the power settings. Atm I'm using the default "Performance" powerscheme in Vista.

Bratwalnut you could try setting up some manually entered timed recordings and see what happens - remember that vista wakes up 2 or minutes before a show and closes down 2 or 3 minutes after (settable in settings somewhere).

Also you do not need the ui running. As long as a process called ehhome (I think) is running you will see a little red recording circle come up in the system tray. (I closed down the ui on RC2 to get it to sleep/resume properly.)