Got my new laptop -studio 15- a few days back. And of course I had upgraded to a night unlimited internet broadband plan. So I wanted to make my laptop start all by itself after 2am, start the download queue and shutdown when the task is done while i'm merrily asleep.
Of course one may find a lot of material on scheduling download queues and shutting down after they are completed but, what of the starting part? One option is to keep the machine on sleep and wake it up at scheduled time. But then, it wastes a lot of power running idle for a lot of time.
So I wanted a solution which could turn on my machine after it had been shutdown or hibernated.
One solution I found is to get into your BIOS configuration program and look for power management tab, there you may find an option for wake up on---. But not all systems come with this utility.And there may be some people who will not understand what to do there. So for these needs there are a few softwares that do this job for us. One of them is wake up on standby. Don't be fooled by the name, it doesn't mean that it only wakes up from stand by. It can also wake from hibernate or shutdown (though both are more or less the same from power perspective :)).
Such systems work on ACPI- Advanced Configuration Power Interface. The machines which have such a facility can be turned on after shutdown automatically at a chosen time using internal timers. This software also offers other scheduling functionalities which you may or may not use as there are other better ways of scheduling.
You can get that software here.
Of course this thing is for windows and I don't know of any such software for linux, and if you find one tell me where to get it :)
These are some things to note for such kind of use
1)If you are using multiple operating systems put the o.s. where you have scheduled the downloads at the default position.
2) Put that o.s on auto log on, and so the system won't ask for authentication.
