Getting only monitor to sleep/suspend.

[cejota3]

Okay folks, I really searched through the forums and documentation to try to get this work on my own, but I'm still stuck.

I have my HTPC connected to a monitor. (A big Gateway one that looks just like a TV.) The picture is great, and it simplifies many things. I do not have any of my power management stuff enabled, NOR DO I WANT TO. I’m fine having my HTPC on all the time. The extra couple bucks a month in electricity is definitely worth it to me as opposed to trying to get the mess of power management settings to work just right.

However, I would like for my monitor to go into sleep/suspend on its own, and I just about got it except for one nagging issue. (And again, I do NOT want to put the rest of my computer, harddrives, etc. to sleep or hibernate, just the monitor.)

I created a power scheme where “Turn off monitor” is set to 1 minute (everything else is set to “Never”). Watching something (live or recorded) works just fine because Windows obviously thinks something is active. When I put SageTV into its “Standby” (which via the Hauppague remote you do with the green “power” button), the SageTV screen saver comes on, and then a minute later, the monitor turns off. Great!

The problem is when I go to any of the SageTV menus where there isn’t a live picture, for example the main menu. Windows doesn’t think anything is going on and puts the monitor to sleep after 1 minute. I thought that the purpose of the “Status check frequency” (which I have set to the default 30 seconds) was to (as the manual says) keep the system active. I have “Screen Saver Timeout” set to the default of 20 minutes.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

[jokestr]

Has anything changed for you regarding this issue? I have a 42" LCD monitor I am using and have the same issues. When I come out of sleep, after pausing live TV for 5-10 minutes the monitor turns on, but the SageTV sleep screen is still active. I usually have to open the close the menu to clear it.

[cejota3]

Hey Jokestr, the simple answer to your question is no. For whatever reason, I could never get the “Status check frequency” in Sage to actually make Windows think that there was really activity on my machine (and thus not put it to sleep) during any other time other than playback. (In other words, when paused or just sitting on a menu, Windows would think the system was idle and would eventually kick in and put things to sleep at times when I didn't want it to.)

Now that was nearly a year ago when I was still using Sage 4.some-or-other. I've sinced upgraged to 6.something (I can't remember what point release and I'm now at work, but it is more or less the most up-to-date version of SageTV). Other than having to pay extra for the upgrade, I've found 6.x to be great. HOWEVER, I do not know if this issue is fixed because ...

What I eventually did was find a program that could put a computer monitor to sleep. http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html (By the way, I've found this command line program, NirCmd, to be really handy for a lot of things.) I then modified the "sleep" button on my remote (again, it is the green button on the standard Hauppauge remote) to not only do what it normally does (which is put Sage to sleep), but to also call this NirCmd program to turn off my monitor by calling: "nircmd.exe monitor off". It works like a charm and solved all of my problems so I never went back to fiddling with all of the power settings in Sage and Windows (which I always had problems with).

Again, I'm at work, but if you'd also like me to post the modifications to get the remote to call NirCmd, I could do that later tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks,
C.J.