Standby timer: 10 minutes

[fixup]

I have noticed a very interesting phenomenon about Windows XP power management: if I set the standby timer to be longer than 10 minutes, say 15 or 20 minutes, most of the time the computer simply won't go sleep by itself.

Once I set the idle time to 10 minutes, sleep is guaranteed, except cases like Word is working on a file that's on a network folder.

Seems one or more XP services break the idle timer every 15 minutes or so. I never figured out which service(s) does that.

If your Thinkpad (and other XP PCs) does not always go sleep by itself, try set the standby timer to 10 minutes or less.

[Terrahawk]

Both my R40 and my X31 have sleep times at 15 minutes, and my Athlon 64 desktop machine has a sleep time of 1 hour. All three machines go to sleep reliably at the appointed time. Mind you, I have disabled a lot of unnecessary services.

When I had them, my X20 and X21 both had 15 minute sleep times which always worked too. If you find out what service resets the sleep timer, let us know

[fixup]

With X20 and X21, I actually have to set the standby timer to be 3 minutes to get reliable standby. If I set it to 5 minutes or longer, they may never go into sleep.

There is something wrong with the timer in X20 and X21. Even the screen saver may not work if I set the timer to 5 minutes or longer.