Set your computer to sleep and wake up on a schedule with SmartPower

I recently covered Aerofoil, which can be used to make your laptop a bit smarter about its power usage. Now you can show your desktop computer or Windows Home Server the same kind of love using SmartPower. While SmartPower has some features in common with the previously covered Shutdown Timer, there's one major difference: it can make your computer wake up, too.
You can use SmartPower to force your computer go to sleep every day at 2AM and wake up right before you're due back from work. Combined with Windows' auto-logon feature, it would seem to you as if your computer is constantly on. In reality, though, you would be saving quite a bit of power -- as well as wear and tear on its hard drives and fans.
SmartPower also lets you set other conditions. For example, you can have your computer go to sleep at 2AM unless it is currently downloading something, or if a program is running, or if there's a specific host on the network (for example, your laptop is on, and you're streaming media from your home server).
All in all, this is a clever application. It does something that I wish had been built into Windows in the first place.
Download SmartPower for Windows

Posted in: Windows