>>>Hi all,
>>>
>>>My application has to do certain tasks overnight. The code was allright, but VFP failed to execute the program at certain hour in the night just because the computer felt in standby mode and VFP did not wake it up to perform the tasks.
>>>
>>>How can I force the computer to wake up within VFP to execute the code afterwards?
>>>
>>
>>You can't; you need something external to your system to trigger the wakeup action, since entering the suspend state stops all program execution. If you're on a network, you might investigate Wake-On-LAN if your operating system, motherboard and NIC fully support ACPI and APM, otherwise, disable the standby mode within both the BIOS and in Control Panel.
>>
>>I'd strongly advise disabling suspend and virtually all standby options other than video-related options; if your CPU clock rate is dropped or the hard disk is spun down, all sorts of strange things can (and probably will) happen. The APM suspend/standby modes are really designed to deal with power management requirements for a laptop, where inactivity after a period of time is an indication to the system that it wants to save the current system state and minimize power consumption to maximize battery life.
>
>What can happen? I'm leaving my disks spinned down, and I find it generally annoying to wait for them to wake up. Do I save any reasonable amount of electricity? Note, my machine is up at least 16 hours a day.

Dragan, that's my point. you don't save any significant money. The only time APM makes sense is where the battery is the scarce resource. The drive motor pulls a whole lot of current, and it's less expensive to keep memory contents intact than it does to run a CPU, so suspending the processor after some period of inactivity means Joe Airline Passenger doesn't have to be penalized for failing to shut off the beastie while he eats what alledgedly is airline food, or nodding off on the train ride home.

Shutting off power to the monitor after an hour makes a reasonable amount of sense; a couple of 17" or 19" monitors draw a good deal of power, andmine wake up in a few seconds. The monitor on the server is not needed much at all, and if I can have a soft on/off switch, great - hit a key and the monitor wakes up.

Would it be better to eat the CPU by running OpenGL Pipes or Organic Art?

I've seen too many things go wrong with APM to use it; if nothing else, it's one more thing that can go wrong, and one less thing to have to rule out as to what got broken. I have far too many things loaded up as it is.