Hi,bonson59:
Resuming from standby using the remote depends on a few things ...
1. Your PC supports Wake on USB. Basically, you bios has to be set up to keep power to the device and listen for a wake command. Only older motherboards will give you any trouble here, anything from this century should support this.
2. You're using a USB port that supports this feature. Some motherboards don't provide this ability to all of their USB ports. It's usually the front panel usb ports that don't have this ability. The ones straight off the motherboard usually do.
3. Your driver/OS is set up to support this feature. Sometimes the remote driver isn't setup to do it, in which case you should run MST (MCE Standby Tool) and make sure that wake up is enabled for the remote.
4. "Standby" can mean a few different things ... Do you mean S1 (POS), S3 (STR) or S4 ("Hibernate")? Take a look here for a list of standby states and what the differences are. I can only get my remote to resume from S1 or S3, not S4. But I must admit that it is not a feature I actually use.
If all of those things are satisfied then you should be able to wake the computer by pressing the PC Power button on the MCE remote. That's the only button that can be used to wake the PC. When you press it you should see the light come on inside the receiver.
Standby is a pain, so good luck!
I tried what you suggested, including MST, but no luck. The light on the IR receiver never comes on when in standby. I'm wondering whether the root of the problem is the computer I'm using. It's an almost new but very much bottom of the line notebook (Compaq C710tu). I tried all three USB ports with no luck. Is it likely that it's just not designed to be woken up by anything other than the power button on the machine itself?
As a test, I tried to wake it using the mouse but device manager doesn't even give the "allow wake up from sleep with this device" option (which it does with this mouse/driver on my PC)
Unless you have any other ideas it looks like I'm destined to continue walking the two metres from my lounge chair to the notebook to wake it up each night. Oh well, I guess I'll find a way to cope with it.
BTW, I can put the notebook into standby (S3) using the remote but I can't shut it down. I assume this is also likely to be caused by the notebook I'm using. Does this sound right to you?
Thanks for all your work/help