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pc with auto power-up

Dropbox has announced that they will no longer allow allow XP systems to play, so I guess it's time to upgrade my cabin automation system.

I need a small, cheapish, low-power PC that runs W7 or 10. The main problem is that, if power fails and comes back, which it does a lot in the winter, I need the PC to start back up, without anybody around to push the power button.

I tried Dell chat and then Dell email support, and they appear clueless about whether their BIOS's support powerup. The chat guy thought I wanted to overclock! No response at all from the email.

A laptop would be ideal, but I've never seen one whose bios does this. So maybe some SFF box. There's not much room in the ski boot closet, where the gear lives.

I could get two of these and have a spare:

formatting link

Do desktops usually/always allow auto powerup?

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
Reply to
John Larkin
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As far as I know, Dropbox still supports linux.

Reply to
Chris Jones

Wouldn't a Raspberry Pi or similar cheap SBC fit the position better?

Depending on how long the power outages are an SSD based laptop with wake on LAN might be the other way around it. Ping it to get it going again - assuming that the router has survived the brownout(s).

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Regards, 
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

I did this once on a bunch of PCs. All I did was put a large cap across the power on button.( Or was it from the power on pin to ground ? I forget). Simple. When power comes back on, the cap 'grounds' the power on pin until it gets charged up by the 5V trickle supply line.

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Reply to
TTman

Windoze 8.1 has become very much like Win 10. If you can tolerate Win

10, then Win 8.1 will also suffice. Personally, I prefer Windoze 7 Pro.

Yes. Any machine that pretends to be a server has a setting as to what to do when the power goes off and comes back on. Something like:

Restore from AC power loss [always off | always on | last state]

The default is "last state" which is tolerable but "always on" is what you want. I have several Optiplex 755 machines in use including my office accounting machine. I'll double check the BIOS features later today or tonite.

The Optiplex 755 machines have been quite good and reliable. No failures or surprises. There are 4 box sizes. Mini Tower(MT), Desktop(DT), Small Form Factor(SFF), and Ultra Small Form Factor(USFF). I would avoid the USFF, but the others are ok. The MT is nice because the one big fan makes it a very quiet machine. The SFF is tight if you want to add boards and drives. I also don't like laptop CDROM drives in the SFF. Ignoring SFF, there are 4 memory slots which offer a maximum of 8GB PC2-6400 RAM. I like to max out the memory because it's cheap. Also, think about an SSD instead of rotating memory. For a CPU, I suggest an Intel E8500 (3.16GHz, 8MB cache, 1333 MHz bus). I like to buy the cheaper slower boxes, and replace the CPU and RAM. Make sure you update the BIOS to the latest.

How to Make Your PC Restart Automatically After a Power Outage

How to setup your computer to auto Power On after power outage.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Thanks. I have seen small PCs, mini-ITX and laptops, that had a bios that didn't have the startup option.

I'll get a couple of the Dells (horrible long link above).

That will do me until Dropbox drops Win7 support.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
Reply to
John Larkin

Please wait until I verify that the Optiplex 755 has and auto power-up boot feature.

Win 7 will be "supported" by MS until Jan 14, 2020. I presume Dropbox will not shoot themselves in the foot by pulling the plug any earlier.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann
[snip]

I viewed a Dropbox drawing this AM and got an E-mail saying I logged-in from an XP machine... I didn't... it's a Win7 PC ??? ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

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| 1962 |

I'm looking for work... see my website.

Reply to
Jim Thompson

Many desktop systems, including Dell, have a 3-way option on power restoration: Always off, always power up, and power up if it was on when power failed. Most of the ones I have here have this.

You could also use a Linux OS for this.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

I'm not a Linux person, and all the application software is Windows stuff. I don't want this to become a giant project.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Reply to
John Larkin

I'd have to rewrite all the software. Yuk.

In the winter especially, power can be flakey up there, outages of random duration. I'd like the system to be up whenever it can.

A laptop+UPS is an option, but UPSs seem to mostly have short but unspecified holdup times.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Reply to
John Larkin

Yeah, a hardware hack is a possibility. But setting a BIOS option would be easier.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Reply to
John Larkin

On Fri, 5 Aug 2016 10:43:15 +0100 TTman wrote in Message id: :

I remember doing a similar hack with a 555 (*GASP*) that ran on the +5SB and was disabled when +5 came up.

Reply to
JW

It does.

I've got 3 (USFF) that were "bad cap rescues". YMMV. For the price of a few caps and the time to remove/install, they were good deals (i.e., free). We use one for email/WWW and another as a media server (because I have a half dozen spare "hot swappable" DVD drives for them)

They aren't particularly quiet (I wouldn't want to sleep with one in the same room -- fan noise). Nor particularly cool. Also, the "brick" is HUGE!

The fan *under* the drive tends to fail (based on what I saw when cherry-picking my rescues). It's also pretty large (contrast with the FX160 I recommended up-thread -- probably 3 or 4 times the volume; and, that's the USFF variety!)

The biggest drawback to the USFF is single drive (though I suspect most folks have migrated to those sorts of constraints) and lack of PCI slots. OTOH, it has all the "normal" I/O's on the main-board so little to really NEED to "add on" (SCSI HBA? CAN adapter? etc.)

AIUI, John is looking for a box to just move files to/from his dropbox account, not layout PCB's or render 3D models. The fact that he wants to hide it in a closet suggests use as an appliance and not a workstation. Mine, (headless) draws about 80-90W when not overly "taxed". Not sure I'd want a ~100W light bulb sitting in a closet while I'm not on the premises...

At 10-15W, the FX160 runs off a dinky (500VA) UPS *forever*! (I've one hidden under a bedside dresser that's touting an uptime of 300+ days, despite outages, etc. I reboot it when I have to replace the UPS's battery; never otherwise)

Reply to
Don Y

I have a USB driveway cam to scope the snow level, and a semi-homebrew RTD temperature acquisition/furnace control rig. It pings images and reports and control files through a Dropbox folder. The main program is compiled 32-bit PowerBasic.

I wasn't happy with the home-automation gear that's available, so I did my own. The big problem is power failures and cable internet outages and hangups. I may add a timer to power cycle everything for a half hour every, say, Thursday at 1AM, so I can generally turn on the heat for the weekend.

Our cable modem at home hangs up occasionally too, and a power cycle fixes it.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Reply to
John Larkin

Ok. It's in the BIOS. See:

There's one additional features that might be useful. You can set the time to turn on the machine. That's turn on, not off. I've never used this as WoL (Wake on LAN) is also available in the BIOS.

Also, you might want to look at the Optiplex 760 instead of the 755. They're very similar machines and frankly, I don't recall the differences except that the 760 is slightly later. I installed an office full of the 960 desktop models running Windoze

8.1 about a year ago. No problems other than recovering from Microsoft's "accidental" forced upgrade to Win 10. 
--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

They claim it won't run in the "compatibility mode" which makes me wonder what else in Oz the wizard is doing behind the curtain.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

That's why I suggested that John avoid the USFF package. Not only do the fans fail, the HDD they are suppose to keep cool overheats even when the fan is working. Another problem is that it only has two memory slots thus limiting the machine to half the momory of the larger boxes. It also should get an award for the largest external (DA-2/DA-3) power supply.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

By rewrite I think you mean recompile. It really shouldn't be too hard unless you used a *lot* of windows calls.

A UPS is not so great on a 100 watt desktop, but great for a low power device like an rPi. Even better is a laptop which has a built in UPS which can work for hours if you pick a low power model. I've seen them claim 8 hours and seen netbooks run nearly that long.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

On Fri, 05 Aug 2016 13:41:39 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote: (...)

I forgot to mumble something about shutdown problems with early BIOS versions of the Optiplex 755: How to Fix Poweroff at Shutdown on Dell Optiplex 755 I've only seen this problem once, but it cost me a 100 mile drive to a mountain top to kick start a weather station. I was using Teamviewer to do some updates. When I did a remote reboot, it didn't quite shutdown completely and of course would not boot. Later BIOS versions have the MEBx BIOS disabled, so you hopefully won't see this problem.

Reminder: Update the BIOS to the latest.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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