Apparently so, but I still say there has to be a hardware dependency. I just tried it with “Free Countdown Timer”, and it did not work after I put the computer to sleep. I had the “allow apps to wake up the computer” enabled and the lock screen disabled, and set the timer for 20 seconds and put the computer to sleep and … nothing. After about a minute and a half I woke up the computer and the countdown timer whined and buzzed about being overdue. So, it depends, and I think it depends on the specific hardware functionality.
Did you check the option box in the Countdown Timer to allow the timer to wake the computer?
You can force the computer to sleep by clicking the power icon, and instead of “Restart” or “Shutdown,” you should have a “Sleep” command.
Oh! Never noticed that.
So, another experiment. I set a timer for two minutes, then did the power/sleep thing, waited about 30 seconds, pushed space bar…and there was a definite pause, and it came up with the screen I normally only see in the morning and it wanted my PIN number. I guess this is the lock screen? Anyway I input the PIN, it brought back my browser window, and I looked at the timer clock and it was counting down, and at zero it did it’s alarm. So, success? I did it again, started timer, sleep, start, pin, timer ran, alarm. So success!
At least when I put the computer to sleep via that power button, which as I said, I’ve never done before. What’s going to happen when it goes to sleep by timing out? Will wait and see. Fingers crossed.
Oh, realized something else to try. I’ll do the start a short timer, put the computer to sleep, then wait to see what happens if it’s still asleep when the timer runs out.
Again, thank you all for getting into this, I had no idea I was doing anything but asking for some top-of-your=head-known info!
If it asks for your PIN, I think you’ll have to disable that. Sorry, I’m on an Android tablet now and can’t check easily, but my computer wanted a password when waking up, and Countdown Timer was running and alarm triggered but I couldn’t hear it until after I input my password.
Okay! So on letting the timer end while the computer was asleep, it popped on the screen as before, but with no sound. When I clicked on the screen I got the request for my PIN, entered it, and immediately it played that alarm.
So…I guess this is what you meant by being blocked by the lock screen? And I need to figure out how to turn it off. Will scroll back to that info.
What’s strange is that it makes a difference:
it it goes to sleep by timing out, no lock screen and the timer doesn’t work.
Turn the sleep on deliberately, and the timer works IF you’ve woken the computer yourself and then put in the PIN..
Turn sleep on deliberately and the timer works to turn the computer on but blocked by the lock screen.
Not very intuitive, at least to me.
Yes, this is what I meant.
I don’t know why there would be a difference between commanding sleep mode and a time out sleep mode. I never put my box to sleep and never tried it until I saw this thread. How does your computer normally go to sleep?
If you don’t have an answer by tomorrow, I’ll look into this again.
I have never found sleep to be useful on a desktop PC, and it’s a shame that now, with my current monitors, I can’t just shut off the screen but keep the PC running. It automatically sends the PC to sleep even if I don’t want it to. Which means the overnight backups and uploads I do also shut down.
I eventually found a special app that bypasses sleep mode and shuts the monitors down, doing something tricky, but the stupid thing will still wake the monitors up if some particular background process occurs (I don’t know which). This app keeps the monitors asleep, but the LED still turns on so it is on-but-off at the same time when it does so.
Long story short, I hate sleep mode.
In the past I’ve never deliberately put my computer to sleep. I turn it on, and at night I turn it off. In between, if I don’t type or mouse for 30 minutes, it just…goes to sleep on its own. The screen goes blank, the power light goes to a slow blink, and it goes quiet, I mean the fan doesn’t run. Then when I want to do something, I push the space bar and it’s all back the way it was, with no lock screen.
Really, this isn’t worth all this work by you and the others. I think I’ll just buy some standalone timer to keep near my computer. Not elegant, but simple and cheap.
Huh. Sounds like a power function.
Let us know if you want to revisit this.
I do that by physically turning my monitor off - with a remote control…or maybe with the power button on my monitor.
No, that doesn’t work. It sends the PC to sleep when I do that.
Do you not have a mobile phone? That’s the easiest and quickest solution.
Why use a phone when you can enlist eight brave Dopers on your quest to use a special app and five different Windows settings?
I have a landline and an extreme simple old phone. Between diabetic retina problems and growing cataracts those teensy phone screens are useless for me.
At work we use the AWAKE option in Microsoft Powertoys when running longer jobs where a shutdown would kill it.
Who knows why these things aren’t just part of Windows anyway.
Calling All Power Users: 27 Ways to Enhance Windows For Free With Microsoft PowerToys
It’s enabled by default and yes, it’s checked. Still does nothing to wake the computer, and whines and complains that the alarm is overdue when I manually wake it.
Based on what others have said, it’s obviously possible for an application to set things up so the computer wakes at a set time, since MacOS can do it, and the aforementioned Windows timer app claims to be able to do it, but I maintain that there’s no way to do it without initializing a timer in hardware. When a Windows computer sleeps, the memory contents is saved to disk, then all disks are turned off, the fan turns off, and finally the memory is no longer refreshed and the processor itself is no longer running.
Everything needed for an application to function disappears. There is no way for it to wake other than either manual intervention or a preset hardware timer intervention. In Windows computers this will be the Real Time Clock (RTC). Maybe the reason the timer thing doesn’t work for me is that RTC wakeup may have to be enabled in the BIOS/UEFI, but I’m not going to turn the computer off and mess with that right now.
Even extremely simple old phones as far back as the Nokia 1100 have alarm functions not interrupted by sleep. Check your mobile phone, there’s almost certainly an alarm/timer feature on it.
Alternatively, go into any thrift store and you should be able to find a clock radio for $1.
What you’re forgetting is that the ACPI subsystem is in effect a separate processor and clock that stays awake as long as at least some electricity is physically coming out of the power supply.
Windows has the software to communicate wake-up timer set-ups to the ACPI hardware. Whether any given motherboard’s ACPI hardware (and interface software) supports all the modes the ACPI standard provides, or just most of them, and how buggily it does so, depends entirely on your hardware.
For the curious … this barely scratches the surface ACPI - Wikipedia but has a nice bibliography.
I’m not forgetting that, and in fact that was really my point – some hardware outside the sleeping main CPU and powered-down disks and memory has to be responsible for the wake-up, because nothing else is alive any more. The only reason the computer revives as it was is because of the magic of all memory context being saved to disk and then restored.