I don’t know if this is exists or is possible, but…
What I need is a timer app that will play an audio alarm when it hits zero EVEN IF the computer has gone to ‘sleep’ in the meantime.
In case ‘sleep’ isn’t the right term, I mean the computer somewhat powers down(?) as in the screen goes to black, but any windows (such as browser windows, or a window with a word processor or a book reader) I have open come back in their current state when I touch the space bar. I know I can change if/how soon this happens – right now it happens when I don’t type anything for 30 minutes.
Situation: normally I turn on the computer in the morning, and leave it running until I go to bed. I browse/type/whatever in spurts during the day. When I don’t do anything for 30 minutes it goes to sleep, and wakes up with my windows there and ready to continue the next time I press the space bar. (Maybe any key – I haven’t experimented.)
I too easily get wrapped up in whatever I’m doing, so if I need to be nudged to take care of something (say, taking a pie out of the over or leave for an appointment) I set a countdown timer I got somewhere or other to play an alarm at the appropriate time.
Normally this works fine … except if I have stopped using the computer for longer than the 30 minutes. Like I decided to stop being slothful and catch up on cleaning or watching a tv show it turns off the computer and the timer program also hibernates. If the desired alarm time falls when the computer has ‘gone to sleep’, the timer app doesn’t work. Sometimes if a “sleep’ has happened, and I’ve since gone back to using the computer, the timer will go off at the desired time …. but sometimes it simply never reactivates, if I click on its icon it just tells me there is, say, nine minutes and twelve seconds left but that’s a stationary number and it doesn’t resume counting down and will never play the alarm. I don’t know what makes the difference in those cases.
So, does anyone know of an app that will wake itself up if needed?
Or is this just impossible, and I should either tell the computer to never sleep and/or buy some stand alone timer gadget?
A third option: Some apps will prevent the computer from going to sleep (for instance, most video-player programs, because it’d be annoying if it went to sleep in the middle of an hour-long show). You might be able to find a timer app that does that, so the computer would normally still go to sleep, unless the timer is running.
Set the alarm on your mobile phone, not your computer. As noted above, the only way to prevent sleeping from pausing the alarm app on a computer is to have the app completely prevent sleeping. Which isn’t really a problem for a computer that’s always plugged in.
Right, as already said, the only solution is to prevent the computer from sleeping either by the timer doing so or by adjusting the power settings.
There is little practical difference between the sleep mode and the hibernate mode. In both cases the complete memory context is written to disk and the computer completely or almost completely powers off and is dead to the world, though it may be woken from sleep by an external event, such as a network event (“wake on LAN”). So no, if I understand your question, there is no software you can install on the computer that will auto-wake, because nothing is running when the computer sleeps.
You don’t have a mobile phone? It should be easy to set a timer on it. If you like the voice assistant, you can just say “hey google/siri, set a timer for 30 min”. If you don’t, you can set them manually in the clock or alarm app or similar that comes with the phone.
By the way, is this a laptop? If so, you can also increase the automatic sleep timeout to be much longer (or never). The screen can still turn off but the computer will stay on then, until you manually turn it off or put it to sleep at the end of the day.
An idle laptop will use very little power even when it’s not asleep, especially if the screen is off.
Count me as another that didn’t know that – in my post above, I was talking about Windows.
What I know about MacOS can be written on the head of a pin, and the head of the pin would still be blank! But if sleep in the Mac world works anything like sleep in the Windows world, the self-wake feature would have to be activated by something in the hardware.
ETA: Yes. Google says this:
Wake from sleep on a Mac is a coordinated process primarily driven by the System Management Controller (SMC) —a dedicated hardware chip responsible for power management—along with the ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) standards built into the logic board.
When I used to build “Hackintoshes” (computers which ran MacOS, but used off-the-shelf PC motherboards), sleep was the hardest thing to get working correctly. If you could get sleep to work, you ended up with a machine that was almost indistinguishable from a real Mac (and often had some very nice features that Apple hardware didn’t support very well). I used a Gigabyte motherboard for many years, and it was one of the best “Macs” I had ever owned.
Here you go. I’ve been using Free Countdown Timer for years. I had to test it to make sure that it will wake my computer from sleep, which I never use.
Works fine, but you must disable your Lock Screen. The app will wake the computer but if the Lock Screen is in the way, you won’t hear the alarm.
Wait, are you sure this wakes a Windows computer from sleep? It shouldn’t be able to do that. The lock screen, monitor off, and “sleep” are all different things.
If your computer is truly asleep, the power LED will most likely be blinking slowly. If it’s solidly on, or if the lock screen is visible, the computer is still fully on and not asleep. When a PC is asleep, no apps should be able to wake it… only low-level hardware events like a USB wake event or a magic network packet.
It’s possible that this app uses that mechanism, or something similar like it, in order to self-wake the computer at a specified time. Magical. I had no idea. Sorry for the misinformation!
Note: Free Countdown Timer will not wake up your computer when the laptop lid is closed.
Thank you @MindsEye_Watering. @StarvingButStrong: This should solve your problem. Several of us were wrong in assuming that apps could not wake the computer like this.
Okay, it turns out the timer program suggested IS the exact one I’ve been using, down to the version number. I’d never read the instructions (bad me) because it seemed to do what I wanted by the obvious steps: Input how long you want the time to run, click start.
But now I went to their home page and eventually found the part about ‘check to see if the app can wake your computer from sleep’ and clicked onto that. Which had me dig down into my computer’s control panel a few levels and I finally found the line labeled sleep line. And under it was the line about ‘allow app to wake from sleep’ (or some such label) which I was supposed to change to ‘enabled.’
It was already enabled! So I clicked it off and then back on, on the ‘thump the top of the TV theory of things. Whether that actually changed anything? I guess I’ll just have to set a timer and then wait for my computer to go to sleep? Which I will do, but it’ll take time.
On a side branch – I don’t know about this Lock Screen stuff. I think it may be already turned off? Because I don’t have anything like that ever appear when I wake the computer up from sleep. I just push the space bar and the next instant I have whatever the screen had when I walked away, nothing before that.
When I turn my computer on in the morning I get a screen that asks for a password, but not just after a sleep. So…I guess that’s not the problem?