Taking a Different Road

Here’s another Intellectual Property follow-up. This time it’s a very interesting TED video. It’s well worth watching.

Johanna Blakely: Lessons from fashion’s free culture

My Dell Studio 15z (Windows 7) has been waking up by itself at night for some reason which I haven’t determined yet. It’s not waking for virus scans. The bad part is it doesn’t shut itself back down. The other night I had it hibernated and it was not plugged in. When I got up in the morning, the battery was dead.

After some searching, I found that it’s a Windows 7 thing. There’s two settings which will allow Windows to wake up your machine if there’s a scheduled task. YMMV - I don’t know if Dell defaults these settings differently from other manufacturers. Here’s the solution from http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19307826.aspx. In a nutshell:

1. Left Click on the power icon at the bottom right of your start bar
2. Click on “More Power Options” (or just search for “power options” on your start bar)
3. Click on “Change plan settings” on either Balanced or Power Saver (depending on which one you use)
4. Click on “Change advanced power settings”
5. Once your Power options panel opens, scroll down and select  “Sleep”
6. Click on “Allow Wake Timers” and then click on “Enable” and scroll down to select it as “Disable” (there’s one for “plugged in” and one for “battery”)