Finally got Vista Media Centre to go to sleep now how do I network

This post is a bit long, and it is a combined question to the community and a
request to Microsoft to put up one or more technical articles about power
settings. I found many posts, not many useful answers about a very basic
subject without which we do not get “Green” PC’s. Microsoft boasts Vista is
the best yet – not so far.

Finally after several months of trying to get my Vista Home Premium computer
to go to sleep on its own I spotted a note about networking on
"thegreenbutton.com". Switching off computer discovery and media file
sharing persuaded my PC to go to sleep on his own. Unfortunately I am in a
multiple PC household and need to share access – even if limited to manually
powering up the media centre PC first – it doesn’t seem to support wake on
lan!

The question is: How much networking can I have without losing shutdown? I
will experiment by switching one option back on at a time.

Basically if Media Centre was set to share media files some PC's will not
shut down, and a further comment blamed an anonymous security update as on
his PC it had been working for months.

A longer explanation was that any driver or process can refuse an S3
shutdown and so the PC will not sleep. The method of discovering which
process was left to the usual suck it and see method of guessing and
disabling things - not friendly even for an expert.

The Microsoft technical site is woefully lacking in articles about the whole
process of wakeup and shutdown despite Vista having had a complete overhaul
in this area. Finding the answers to even basic questions is difficult to
impossible. Knowing the right gibberish keyword in advance seems to be the
only way to find all the articles (something like WVSPDOPT).

So here are some technical points needing FULL answers, and if the article
already exists make it easier to find!!

First: Does a power profile apply to the PC or to the logged in profile?,
if the latter how do I set the profile for the log in screen? It seems to be
the PC.

Second: Power profiles do not seem to have enough options. For a home
desktop PC it would seem that there need to be multiple profiles, or at least
the standard profiles should be settable for each usage mode. Logged in for
games - power settings to maximum, logged in for TV or multimedia - settings
to ??, logged in for “office” work - power settings to low but do not sleep
too quickly while thinking, sitting at the log in screen - go to sleep after
only a couple of minutes, woken up to record or share files – low power and
go back to sleep quickly. Maybe power profiles are this flexible, but help
is no help.

Third: An article to explain how bios and power settings inter-react with
other equipment and settings, even a simple explanation of some settings (S1,
S3, USB legacy support …). How to discover what settings or support are
active or available in a particular PC (the manual is never any good). Why
should sharing media files mean a PC never goes to sleep?, OK I can guess, it
may even be hardware dependant (no “wake on lan” means that to have media
file availability can only be done by staying switched on – doesn’t explain
why the hard disk runs all the time and the processor doesn’t go into low
power mode). This would be a complex article, but is needed.

Fourth: More on equipment, what does Windows think my hardware can do? I
get odd messages about the USB port I am using is slow, switch to a USB 2.0
one – but all the ports are meant to be USB 2.0. Similarly I cannot get my
PC to wake on keyboard – but I think Windows thinks that it is actually a
laptop! This is because of some odd “Help and support” troubleshooting
messages I got.

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