Can someone suggest a solution... (1 Viewer)

[vvulture]

Hi guys...

Here is the scenario..

I have 2 PC's which will eventually both run MP. One is in the lounge room, and the other in the bedroom.

What i need to be able to do is this:

When me and the wife go to bed at night, we watch some TV in the bedroom. The bedrrom unit is networked to the lounge room unit. So far so good.

However, the lounge room unit needs to stay on for the same duration so that we can keep the network connection alive.
When we decide to go to sleep, i need to lounge room machine to realise that , and go to sleep as well.

The problem is, that MP will go to sleep if there is no activity for a set amount of time on the home screen.
Is there a program that can send a signal to the Lounge room unit via lan and tell it to go to sleep ?

Or has anyone got a suggestion ?

thanx very much.

cheers

 

[Elconejo]

I gues the other pc needs to stay on so you can watch recordings or other movies from the lounge pc?
Why don't you get a Harddrive with network connection?
With this you could record the shows of both pc's on this harddisk without the need that the other pc stay's on to watch them.

 

[vvulture]

yeah thats actually a great idea... however, i have invested in 3 x 300Gig Sata Drives in the loung room unit and don't want to buy more drives.

Is it possible to just buy the external network case and put the drives inside ?

cheers

 

[NLS]

1) I think THERE ARE programs that can signal a computer on the LAN to sleep (you need sleep? not shutdown?)

2) Yes there also ARE network solutions that you can plugin your hard-drives on. One popular is this: http://www1.linksys.com/products/product.asp?prid=640 but there are also others.

There is a drawback with the second solution. If you also need to WRITE on the disks not only read, then the disks will need to be formated to FAT32 or EXT2/3, NOT NTFS. Also I am not sure of the partition limitations of FAT32. If this is not a problem for you, then you are ok.

Do some google research.

 

[vvulture]

No problems NLS... thanx for your help.

But i might give this a go : http://www.xpmediacentre.com.au/com...ses-hibernator-take-control-your-machine.html

You never know.. it may do the job...

 

[Elconejo]

There ar alot of cases available with a network connection...

http://www.psism.com/hd363n.htm

http://www.dealsonic.com/arhd3idetorj.html

http://www.alibaba.com/productsearch/Hard_Disk_Enclosure.html

You can search more sollutions on the net...

Good luck !

 

[onkl]

And just to add 0.02:
If FAT seems to become a problem (filesize) and NTFS won't work: some open-source WIndows Ext2 drivers do exist. Google can find a lot of things as you might be aware.

 

[moullas]

If you are running Windows XP on both machines, create a batch file to run the following

shutdown -s -m \\computername -t 2

where computername is the network name of the computer

This command instructs the remote computer to shutdown in 2 seconds...
I think though that you need to be authenticated prior to running this command. To do that you can use either windows (open your pc in explorer by \\computername , put a username and password and click on save OR use the following command
NET USE \\computername /user:username password

so, make a batch file for these, and run them before shutting down the pc in your bedroom. (i don't know if there is an option to run some commands before exiting MP)

 

[NLS]

there are third party shutdown commands that work even better

 

[vvulture]

Thanks for all your help guys... but i think that the best way to tackle this is just to setup a server in my garage.
Several programs would do the job instead of using a server ( "The Hibernator" for instance ).However, the problem is that if MP is put into standby manually or using software other than power scheduler, i find that it doesn't wake up for schedules. Anyone else find this ?
When Power Scheduler is enabled and used, standby/wakeup works fine.

go figure...