[SunRescue] RE: OBP coolness

[Ken Hansen]

Many laptops are able to turn themselves on (that just doesn't *sound right* ;^)... 

You enter a time into the BIOS and the internal clock triggers the laptop to turn on and boot.

Many Toshiba laptops have a Windows tool to help you set this function without monkeying with the BIOS directly...

The usefullnes of this facility escapes me, except to cause email downlaods to occur at night, when phone rates are lower...

I have seen this in some more modern desktops as well - I guess you could set this to boot the machine at 7:30 AM, since you shut it down the night before (it is running *windows*!)...

Another *amazingly stupid* WIndows tool is the System Agent default setting to do a scandisk at (I think) 9:00 pm on Thursday. Of course, if your laptop is running windows and active, the drive will be changing underneath, so the scan disk restarts. If your computer is idle, but running Windows, the scandisk will restart once Windows updates something on the harddrive (like noting it kicked off the screensaver). ANd if your computer is *off* on Thursday night at 9:00, nothing happens.

So tell me, when would the scan disk actually occur?

Ken  

-----Original Message-----
<snip>

Message: 8
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 13:51:35 -0500
From: Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net>
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [SunRescue] OBP coolness
Reply-To: rescue at sunhelp.org

On Thu, May 31, 2001 at 01:05:18PM -0400, James Fogg wrote:
> A typo lead to a discovery. The OBP complained about my typo and said something
> to the effect that the command "words" would give me a list of available
> commands. Sure enough it did. One entry said "power-off"... Hrrmmm... lets see.
> <type> power-off<end type> and #sound-of-drives-parking_and_silence#... it
> powered off. Damn good thing I had dropped to single user and synced first.

I remember the first time I ran across a machine that could turn off its
own power (was some ATX-formfactor PC).

"woah."

Then there's even the Netra T1, which can turn ON its own power.. 8-)