stuck in idle

[ideasman69]

hi guys,

i've been using eventghost for a couple years and love it. recently i just moved from windows 7 to windows 8.1 only to find that eventghost isn't working as perfectly as it was.

the only problem i'm having is that once the screensaver activates, pressing buttons on my remote doesn't return the system from idle.

if i move the mouse or press a key on the keyboard it will return, and in the eventghost log I can see that the remote commands (including some that emaulate keyboard strokes).

just wondering if anyone has seen this or has a workaround?

Cheers!

edit: EventGhost 0.4.1.r1669, windows 8.1 with august rollup

[V_J]

Long shot...

Windows can be set to power down specific devices to save power. If it powers down the receiver, it will not work.

(I'm going from memory and am now on a non-English system, so some things may not be named correctly)
If you go into control panel, device manager, right-click the receiver.
One of the panels is something related to "power". And in it might be settings like "allow windows to power down this device to save power" and/or "allow this device to wake up the computer"

It may depend on which receiver are you using for the remote (usb or something on a tv tuner card), but my first guess would be that it has something to do with some power settings.

[ideasman69]

that's the odd thing - as i mentioned, all the remote commands are being received by eventghost but the system remains idle

[V_J]

Sorry... I missed that one... no idea...

[ideasman69]

i've been playing around with heaps of different macros to get the machine out of idle mode and nothing works unless the actual mouse or keyboard are used.

using macros to press keys or move the mouse do nothing. looks like a bug with eventghost and windows 8

[krambriw]

For many years I have been using a macro as below in Windows 7 to avoid that the pc locks itself. Is this type of macro not working in Windows 8.1?

Image5.jpg (5.44 KiB) Viewed 3899 times

[ideasman69]

Thanks for the response. I tried emulating the shift key to bring the machine out of idle but still doesn't work in windows 8

[V_J]

It looks like a bug, but in the mean time a workaround could be useful. This idea may be using a hammer to kill a fly, but maybe it works (another long shot)...

Windows has a commandline utility to change the current powerschema. The official documentation is here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 10%29.aspx

I used it to change the powerschema when music is playing back, to switch to a schema that does not have a screensaver and does not apply powersaving on the hdmi output, or I would lose audio as well. I described here how to use it for that:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6050&p=30238#p30300

Perhaps switching to a powerschema that does not do powersaving at all might un-idle the computer. But I don't know if changing the powerschema will do that, just a thought. If it works, you can make a small batchfile that switches to this powerschema and back, and execute the batchfile when the system is idle and when a button is pressed... Or perhaps there are other commandline tools that can wake it up...
Windows Task Scheduler can wake up the computer, but I don't know if it is possible to trigger something from EventGhost: http://www.groovypost.com/howto/schedul ... matically/