I’m Home for Android allows you to fire up sleeping devices on network connect
If you’ve got a computer on and ready for whenever you’re home, but you don’t like it running all day doing whatever nefarious things computers do while you’re at work, and you don’t want to have to wait for it to boot up when you finally get to it, a little app called I’m Home for Android may be just what you’re looking for. Alternately, if you want your work computer off all night but powered on by the time you’ve reached your office, this might be useful.
I’m Home utilizes Wake on LAN, a feature many computer enthusiasts who’ve poked around their computer’s BIOS have seen but may not have used. Wake on LAN is a feature that, when enabled on a PC, allows the system to be powered up from a powered off state, since most computers these days never truly power all the way off (they just enter varying lower states of power consumption).
The idea behind I’m Home is that you define what computer to wake on what WiFi, and when your phone enters and connects to that WiFi network, the I’m Home app sends out a broadcast wakeup request to your computer. You can define different computers on different networks so that your home computer fires up while you’re in the driveway and your work computer is ready when you sit down.
While it’s not a complete game changer, it does lessen the amount of time you spend waiting for a machine to boot and be ready, and can save on electric consumption.
I’m Home is free and available from Google Play.
Download: Google Play
Or just get an SSD and your computer will start up in a matter of seconds.
if your motherboard supports it and if you’re not dealing with waiting on other servers to load or process login scripts.
Good point… I guess the 8gb of Ram and i7 processor help. Plus I set it up to not load a bunch of BS on start up. But I usually leave it on to seed.
yup… I’m running a six year old comp at my house, probably the first of its kind to support SSD. But before the SSD it took me 12 minutes to boot it. Entirely disk access
Oh, you laugh… I would to, but it is absurd all the stuff running on it… vmware for the personal website, virtual mac, a website, outlook, backup software for the office, seeder, a couple of apps that literally had to read 40,000 files every time they booted.
However, I never turned it off and most of the stuff I just manually started so that I could deal with one absurd set at a time.
Still, in that scenario, well, an SSD would be preferable, but at 512GB max at the moment? some of them are a bit too tiny.
Plus this is free, and you can wake tasking computers should you want.
You should see one of my old computers I still use when I need a 32bit Windows XP to use some root tools…800Mhz processor with 256Mb of RAM…yup.
Does Wake on LAN support computers that are only on WiFi, or do they have to be connected via Ethernet cable?
There’s a wake on wireless lan spec: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee851581(v=ws.10).aspx
whether it works or not I do not know at the moment… may try that out a bit later
Like Paul said I know it is technically possible as I’ve seen it done, but I don’t know how difficult it would be to set up.