SLEEP VERSION 1.20 EnQue Software and Consulting Services Route 1 Box 116C Pleasant Hill, MO 64080 Voice/Fax: 816-987-2515 24-Hour BBS: 816-353-0991 !! PLEASE READ THIS FILE IF YOU EXPERIENCE PROBLEMS OR HAVE QUESTIONS: !! !! IF YOU DO NOT FIND YOUR ANSWER, PLEASE FAX OR E-MAIL YOUR QUESTION. !! !! WE CANNOT ACCEPT VOICE PHONE CALLS ON FREE UTILITIES. THANK YOU. !! !! TO PRINT THIS FILE FROM DOS TYPE "PRINT README.TXT" AND [ENTER]. !! -------------------------- QUICK USER REFERENCE ---------------------------- SLEEP C 10 - put drive C to sleep after 10 minutes SLEEP C 0 - disable drive C sleep mode SLEEP D 3 - put drive D to sleep after 3 minutes SLEEP D 0 - disable drive D sleep mode -------------------------------- DISCLAIMER -------------------------------- First, let's dispense with the legal mumbo-jumbo in English. Though EnQue Software strives to provide the highest quality software products at the lowest possible price (in this case free), we cannot accept responsibility for any damages that may be incurred by their use. As with any drive utility, it is strongly recommend that you back up your data before use. This program is FREEWARE and may be copied and distributed without charge and without further permission to anyone and everyone. We would love to see thousands, even millions of people use this program. This program must not be sold for profit. It may be included with other products, commercial or otherwise, as long as this text file is included, and both it and the program are not modified in any way. ------------------------------- DESCRIPTION -------------------------------- Most IBM and compatible PC computers shipped in the last several years use IDE hard disks. Many of these hard disks have built in power saving features, where the drive "spins down" after a certain amount of time. This feature is especially useful for computers that must remain on for long periods of time, such as BBS's and computer-driven FAX and voice mail systems. However, it is seldom used except in notebook computers. With this program you can now take advantage of this feature effortlessly. This program is not a TSR and consumes no memory. ----------------------------- HOW TO USE SLEEP ---------------------------- Simply include the following line in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. SLEEP C 10 The first parameter specifies the drive and can be either C or D. If you have two drives, simply add a line for each drive. If you have a drive partitioned into multiple logical drives, such as C, D, and E, this is still one physical drive, C. If you have a second hard disk, even if the partitions are E, F, and G, this is still the second physical disk, or D. Just remember that the first physical drive is C, and the second is D. A few people may have three or four hard drives in a system. This setup requires two IDE controller cards. To put these drives to sleep, use SLEEP E and SLEEP F. SLEEP will detect the alternate I/O address used by the additional controller and activate these drives. The second parameter is the timeout in minutes. This can be between 1 and 15. After this amount of time, if no disk activity has occurred, you hard disk will "spin down". In other words, the drive motor will shut off. As soon as your computer needs to access the disk, the drive will "spin up" and proceed as normal. Depending on your hard disk type, this may take anywhere from 2-10 seconds. This cycle then repeats. During normal use, you may never have the drive spin down, but during breaks, lunch, and overnight, the benefit occurs. Don't worry about spinning the drive up and down - they are rated in the tens of thousands of cycles. This is dozens of cycles per day for years - more than the life of most PC's. TO DISABLE SLEEP: If you would like to return the drive to the default setting and disable sleep, simply enter 0 as the timeout value, i.e. SLEEP C 0. This product does not perform read or write operations to your disk at any time, and will automatically detect an IDE drive. If your drive is SCSI or an older AT drive, the program will simply exit with an error message. The program will also tell you if you have an IDE drive that does not support sleep mode. --------------------------- NOTE TO WINDOWS USERS ------------------------ This program was written for DOS. If you attempt to run this program from a Windows DOS box, Windows will tell you that the program attempted direct access of the IDE interface and will intercept the attempt! Windows may also think you are running on a notebook and may disable 32-bit disk access. If you run this from DOS or the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, Windows should operate normally and will spin the drive up when as needed. -------------------------- WHY YOU SHOULD USE SLEEP ---------------------- It is estimated that it costs America billions of dollars each year just to power computers. While a hard disk consumes much less power than a monitor, it is a major consumer of energy. By using this utility, coupled with common sense actions such as turning off your monitor and turning the speed of your computer down (for systems that have a turbo/normal speed switch) while your computer is unattended can result in significant power savings. So what does this translate into in terms of dollars? Let's say that there are 50 million PC computers that use IDE hard drives. Let's also assume that about 50% of these are left running overnight (which is common practice among many corporations). A typical spinning hard disk uses about 2-4 watts of power. That translates to about 1200 MWH consumed unnecessarily spinning hard drives every night: that works out to be over $100,000 a day or nearly $40 million a year! In standby mode, the power consumption of your drive is reduced to about 1/2 watt. That translates to only about $5 million a year, a savings of $35 million! Yes, it's hard to believe that if everyone used this free utility, America alone would save tens of millions of dollars a year! While your individual savings may be small, it all adds up... We hope you enjoy this product. We also have several 'C' programming productivity products available for free download on our 24-hour BBS, so feel free to stop by and drop us a line. If you are a software developer or system administrator and would like access to the source code for sleep, feel free to contact us. You can send us InterNet mail at any of the following addresses: KHuck116@aol.com DrBoyd@aol.com 73670.636@compuserve.com It is a shame that it took this long to become "Green" minded. Soon, all PC's will take advantage of this and other features. Good luck being "GREEN"! Sincerely, Kevin L. Huck Dr. Boyd G. Gafford EnQue Software and Consulting