Power Saving Problem & Solution

[Diego Garcia]

Recently my SageTV system would sometimes go into a deep power saving mode which required the power button to be cycled to restore it. At other times it would go into a shallower power saving mode which required only a keypress to restore. The deeper state, unfortunately, would not restore based on whatever wakeup timer event Sage put into Windows, so I ended up missing shows. The shallower state worked fine.

It turns out, at least for me, that the problem derived from my motherboard, and perhaps power supply, not quite supporting the S3 system standby state (S3 is the deeper mode; S1 is the shallower mode). There's not supposed to be a difference between S1 and S3, so far as what will bring a system back. However, if the motherboard and power supply don't quite mesh you can end up with S3 not being "restorable" the way it's supposed to be.

Changing my motherboard BIOS so that it would only allow the system to go into the S1 state (and not the S3 state) solved the problem...mostly. I have run into one instance where the system, post the fix, dropped into a "nonrestorable" state. However, I think that problem was caused by a crash resulting from a conflict between my Hauppauge HDPVR and Sage v6.