Re: Setting system startup time?

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Christian Kaiser wrote:

Hi,

I don't know a better group - sorry. Who can give me some hints on how to set the system's startup time (usually stored somewhere in the BIOS) from inside Windows?

I do a program that measures several parameters of solar collector systems, and I want it to be able to shutdown in the evening (easy) and restart at the next morning (that's the problem) to avoid energy waste.

If I'm understanding your question properly, then from within a Win32 application you want to be able to modify the automatic wakeup time that is stored in the BIOS such that after your application initiates a O.S. shutdown & power-off, the BIOS will wake up & reboot the system at some time in the future?

Is that correct?

If so, I think your best bet is going to be to investigate the somewhat murky & complex world of WMI [Windows Management Instrumentation]. It is one of the few components of the O.S. that I've seen that can interact with the BIOS at all, and there may very well be a WMI object with a method that can allow you to get/set this value in the BIOS. Lacking the availability of WMI, of if WMI simply turns out not to be able to do this, then there may still be hope. DMI [Desktop Management Instrumentation? Desktop Management Interface?] was an earlier specification for getting & setting BIOS information, especially monitoring stuff like the fan sensors & CPU temperature sensors, and monitoring the failure prediction status of S.M.A.R.T. enabled hard drives. However, each motherboard & BIOS manufacturer was responsible for developing their own DMI tools for each O.S. that would run on their hardware, so not every mobo/BIOS combo would necessarily support DMI. I recall that IBM and a few other major PC manufacturers also had DMI kits that were somewhat far reaching in their support of mobo/BIOS combos from other manufacturers if the hardware had DMI support built into the BIOS. Researching DMI further might net you some useful result.

Finally, if I'm not completely up to date in my knowledge of power management API functions in Windows, given a system with an ATX power supply & motherboard, there may very well be an API function or WMI object/method that can modify this particular BIOS value for you as part of the system power management functionality.


HTH,

Chuck
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Chuck Chopp

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Relevant Pages

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