(imported comment written by BenKus)
Hi Jamie,
Ahh… you are experiencing the dreaded “PC Narcolepsy” problem (as opposed to a separate and potentially more problematic “PC Insomnia”).
The problem is the Windows “Unattended Idle Timer”. Here is some info in the Windows programmer’s reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373235(VS.85).aspx
Here is a description of the issue as I understand it:
By Microsoft’s design, if you wake-up a computer from standby with a wake-on-lan packet, the computer will start the “Unattended Idle Timer”. If no keystroke/mouse movement is detected for 2 minutes, the system will go back to sleep. This is unfortunately not configurable (at least not in XP… I believe it is configurable for Vista). Of course, this is an issue for using wake-on-lan for standby mode because it limits the time-window you can reasonably perform tasks.
Couple notes on this:
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You will often not see this issue if your computers suffer from “PC Insomnia”, which causes your computers to refuse to go into Standby in many cases (this turns out to be quite a lot of systems and we have Fixlet content in the BigFix Power Management site that helps you get around the PC Insomnia issues).
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We are working on a solution to this issue, but we haven’t released it into the product yet… but if you want to contact me directly, I can work with you to implement it in your test environment and see if it will work for you.
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I know a few of our customers have been contacting MS directly to ask how to configure the Unattended Idle Timer in Windows XP… You might want to check with them and if they give you a mechanism to control this, we can help you use BigFix to configure it…
Thanks,
Ben