Prevent standby/shutdown

[fairyprincess]

Is there a built in app/command that stops a computer automatically shutting down after a period of time, i'm talking about the feature you have in most media plays so that when your watching something and don't interact with the computer it doesn't shut down, also get it in download programs.

This has to be done without changing power plans.

So any ideas?

Thanks

Edited May 15, 2008 by fairyprincess

[Sithtiger]

Are you talking about your computer going to sleep? You can stop that and stop it from hibernating. Just change your power profile in Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Power Profile. Then set it to High Performance. Then if you need to you can select change the settings and look at individual components such as the hard drive. I've got mine auto sleep for the hard drives set to never. If I want it to go to sleep, I want to manually do it myself!

[fairyprincess]

Thanks, but as i tried to explain in the post "This has to be done without changing power plans"

I'm sure everyone knows the implementation of this in media plays and download managers, it requires no changing of power settings, it simply prevents it from happening, I'm guessing either by pretending the computer is being used or intercepting the signals.

Edited May 15, 2008 by fairyprincess

[spacesurfer]

I understand what you're talking about...

I, however, have not experienced any trouble preventing my computer from sleeping when I'm playing a movie with any of the players - Media Player Classic, Windows Media Player, or VLC Player.

My computer remains on during playback.

I'm not sure about audio music - but I don't think my computer will sleep when I play audio either.

Something else is going on in your computer.

Wait... sorry, I'm using XP. But I don't see why this would be the case in Vista.

[fairyprincess]

I understand what you're talking about...

I, however, have not experienced any trouble preventing my computer from sleeping when I'm playing a movie with any of the players - Media Player Classic, Windows Media Player, or VLC Player.

My computer remains on during playback.

I'm not sure about audio music - but I don't think my computer will sleep when I play audio either.

Something else is going on in your computer.

Wait... sorry, I'm using XP. But I don't see why this would be the case in Vista.

No thats not the problem, i never said it was doing it when media players were running, i just want to be able to achieve that feature and i used them as examples so people would know what i meant.

I'm looking for how these types of applications prevent shutdown/standby etc so that i can recreate that effect.

[fairyprincess]

Well i've found the information http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373208.aspx going to have a go at implementing it, if anyone has any better ideas, then id love to hear them

[Tripredacus]

I understand what you're talking about...

I, however, have not experienced any trouble preventing my computer from sleeping when I'm playing a movie with any of the players - Media Player Classic, Windows Media Player, or VLC Player.

My computer remains on during playback.

I'm not sure about audio music - but I don't think my computer will sleep when I play audio either.

Something else is going on in your computer.

Wait... sorry, I'm using XP. But I don't see why this would be the case in Vista.

This is because media players set a different power profile and settings which prevents this as well as disables the screensaver. You'd figure that if Media Player could disable the screensaver when it was open that Defrag would be able to do the same thing...