Windows Home Server 2007 - How to automatically turn it on at 7pm and turn it off at 11pm

Question

In an effort to reduce my family's consumption on electricity, I would like to automate turning my home server on and off. what's the best approach for this using Windows Home Server 2007? Please list any hardware requirements

Answer 1

Turning the computer on is the job of BIOS, since Windows is not operational, yet.

So, depending on BIOS type, press Del or F2 or whatever the shortcut is to enter the BIOS on startup, go to Power Management and set the Wake on Alarm / Wake up timer to 7 pm everyday, if it is available.

You can schedule the daily shutting down of the server in Task Scheduler. Set to run everyday at the time of your choice (here, 11pm). Choose as executable shutdown.exe /s /f.

/s for shutdown,
/f for force closing of running applications. Unsaved changes would be lost, as usual.

I'd recommend you to test this before putting into "productive" use, especially the turning on part.

Answer 2

A typical home computer is at 300W or less. Are you aware that a 300W device consumes 7.2KWH a day if 100% loaded all day. So about $1.25 of electricity in a whole day. Elaborate efforts to modulate one small server is likely to have a very long ROI.