Registry entry to send PC to sleep

[johnsmithbisley]

I have changed a couple of registry entries to get two of my keyboard hot keys to make my PC Hibernate or Shutdown. What I really, really want is one to make it enter Sleep mode. This mode works fine as the default shut down action from the Start Globe menu.

I have tried various combinations of switches on Shutdown and played with SuspendState but I cannot find the program and switches to enter as the command for SLEEP.

Does anybody know the magic combination?

[Fraz]

rundll32.exe PowrProf.dll, SetSuspendState sleep

The above works when run as a shortcut. Haven't tried it any other way.

[johnsmithbisley]

Thanks for a quick reply. I have tried that and it makes my PC Hibernate, not sleep. The condition I get with Start, right arrow, Enter is Sleep, where the PC light slowly flashes on and off and recovery after pressing the main PC start button takes 7-10 seconds.

The shortcut line to suggested puts the PC into full Hibernation with no light on the PC and much longer, about 40 seconds, to resume including the boot process.

Changing the power setting to Allow Hybrid Sleep from On to Off or vice versa makes no differnece.

[Fraz]

Strange. Definitely puts my PC into standby, not hibernate. However, I'm running XP, and I'm guessing you're running Vista.

[johnsmithbisley]

That's right, Vista Home Premium. Between my post and your reply, I tried changing the action that the Power button produces from Shutdown to Sleep, hoping that SuspendState would be affected. No joy, still Hibernate.

Throughout though, Start, Right arrow, Enter does put my PC to sleep. This is becoming a quest....

[Fraz]

It really makes me laugh how the command-line shutdown app that comes with Cygwin (to get some POSIX-goodness on your windows machine) is loads better than the Microsoft equivalent...

shutdown -p 0

works like a treat with that

Not really much use to you though, I expect...

[johnsmithbisley]

Thanks, Fraz. I restart this search every couple of months, hoping that something may have changed on my PC (I do a lot of fiddling) and also because it is so strange that finding out why it damn well won't work is almost as important as getting it to work.

See you in a couple of months, then.

[hibby]

Is there a setting in power management for "When I press the sleep button do:"? I've got it on my Win2k machine, and I'm fairly sure I've seen it on my XP machine. That's assuming it's been carried over to Vista of course. Might be one of those things that Microsoft does to make life complicated.

By the way, the sleep state you described doesn't sound like it's doing much if the light's still on. Is it going to the full S3 state of Suspend-to-RAM, or just S1 where it leaves fans, etc running? You might want to make a quick trip into the BIOS if you're not sure.

[streetster]

isnt it a powersaving option within the bios, ither S3/S5? suspend to ram (ie hibernate) or something...

maybe have a fiddle, not sure if it'll balls up anything tho

[dangel]

open a command prompt and enter:

powercfg -a

It will tell you which sleep states are available.