Archive for February, 2010

12
Feb
10

Sleep States and maximizing power savings.

By azilliax Leave a Comment
Categories: Tech Support and Uncategorized
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So, quick question – how many people know the difference between the various sleep states supported on most computer hardware?

ACPI defines several different power states that a computer can be in at any given time, below is a table copied from Wikipedia that details the sleep states on a computer:

State Description
S0/Working System is on. The CPU is fully up and running; power conservation operates on a per-device basis.
S1 Sleep System appears off. The CPU is stopped; RAM is refreshed; the system runs in a low power mode.
S2 Sleep System appears off. The CPU has no power; RAM is refreshed; the system uses a lower power mode than S1.
S3 Sleep (Standby) System appears off. The CPU has no power; RAM is in slow refresh; the power supply is in a reduced power mode.
S4 (Hibernate) System appears off. The hardware is completely off, but system memory has been saved as a temporary file onto the hard disk. This mode is also referred to as ‘Save To Disk’.
S5 Soft Off System is off. The hardware is completely off, the operating system has shut down; nothing has been saved. Requires a complete reboot to return to the Working state.

Now as you go through these power states the computer consumes less and less power as you move down towards S5, at S5 most computers are pulling about 7watts of power to keep things like wake on lan possible. The biggest drop between the power states happens when you get into the S3 Sleep state, in a large number of cases that’s the sweet spot for saving power.

Now with Windows XP there are some problems with getting into the S3 sleep state, a lot of machines don’t have the S3 sleep state enabled by default as a number of vendors USB devices back when XP was released may not have supported going into a S3 sleep state, or would not be able to wake a computer from S3 sleep with the push of the mouse button or keyboard.

There’s a document on the Microsoft site that details this better than I can:

To prevent a negative end-user experience, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 modify the power capabilities that are returned by the BIOS. Therefore, the system only supports wake by using the USB for the S1 system power state. If there is no USB device that is armed for wake from a system power state, the system enters the S3 system power state during standby.

The page also details a registry key that can be set that will force the computer to go into the S3 sleep state as opposed to defaulting to the S1 sleep state. So if you are looking to maximize the power savings on your older XP workstations – putting the following key into your system may be the trick to get the machines to sleep properly.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usb
“USBBIOSx”=DWORD:00000000

Now some people may ask why not just go to S4, or S5 for that matter to save even more power? Well as you go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole you wind up taking a longer and longer time to come back to the S0 (Working) state on the computer. Anybody that has worked with computers in the past knows that users who have a machine that has gone to sleep is not going to want to wait too long for a computer to come back online. Trick is to balance the power savings against the inconvenience for the end user.

02
Feb
10

New Releases

By azilliax Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized

For those of you who have not heard we have a new release of Core Console available and have finally updated all the associated products to work properly in this new Core Console. WINSelect was the last holdout and was officially signed off on last Friday by our QA teams and should now be available for download from the usual locations.

Core Console 3 represents a fairly large under the hood change in the Core Console product line, and I would honestly recommend it as a upgrade for pretty much all of our customers. The product page for the new version of Faronics Core can be found here. With this build we address a number of customer suggestions and comments about the Core Console that we have gathered over the past year or so.

We have separated the Console UI and the Core Server as two separate components. This change, while it seems small has a number of benefits for the end users:

  • Multiple consoles talking to a single Core Server so that more than one person can be managing workstations through the same Core Server
  • You can now install the Console UI on a different machine than the one running the Core Server, so you no longer have to remote desktop into the computer running Core Console to manage workstations.
  • You can control multiple Core Servers from a single Core Console.
  • Faronics Core no longer needs to be running interactively for a scheduled event to be run. This allows administrators to schedule events and then log off the server completely and still have the events fire properly.

That last point is probably one of the most requested features for Core Console by far.

The other big change that we have done is that we have moved away from using WMI / DCOM as our communications protocol between clients and the Core Server. We have opted to move towards our own protocol based on SOAP for a number of reasons.

First off it gives us more control over what we are doing and allows us to better support environments with mixed operating systems. The second thing that is does is gives us finer control over how we use the network. With WMI/DCOM we had to accept a rather large port range as needing to be open for optimal results (port 135 and anything above 1024), with our new protocol we only require that three ports be addressed (one on the client, two on the server). And finally it frees us up from needing to rely on Windows Authentication as much as we have been, making the software more consistent in Workgroups or situations where a full AD implementation is not in place.

As stated earlier, if you are running an older version of a Core Console managed product I would suggest grabbing the latest versions and giving Faronics Core another poke. And to answer the inevitable question, yes Deep Freeze will wind up in Core Console,  but I don’t have a specific timeframe as for exactly when it will occur.