Dear Lifehacker, I like to turn my computer off at night, but I hate sitting and waiting for it to boot up in the morning. Is there any way I can make my computer start automatically in the morning so it’s ready for me when I get up? Sincerely, Bored During Boot
Icon portion of photo by wordstofyre.
Dear Bored,
We know your pain. While many would recommend you just your computer on all day, we know that can drain unnecessary power, not to mention make a lot of noise. It’s actually pretty easy to start up your computer each morning when you wake up, or each day when you come home from work. You can even set it to shut itself down at night, too. Here’s how.
On Windows
To automatically start your computer up at a specific time of day, you’ll actually need to edit your BIOS settings. To do this:
- Boot up your computer and enter your BIOS setup. Usually this involves pressing the Delete key as your computer boots (your computer should say
Press DEL to Enter Setupor something similar as you turn it on). - Navigate to the Power Options. If your BIOS supports it, there should be a function for automatically starting up your computer at a certain time of day. Mine was called “Resume by Alarm”, but yours might be called something different.
- Enable that setting and set the time you want your computer to start every day. Save and Exit the BIOS, and your computer should follow that schedule from now on.
You probably shut down your computer when you’re done using it at the end of the day, but if not, you can set it to shut itself down on a schedule. This is easy to do with Windows Task Scheduler:
- Hit the Start menu and type in “task scheduler”. Open up Task Scheduler from your results.
- In the right pane, hit Create Task. Give it a name, and under the General tab, check “Run with highest privileges”. Also check “Run whether user is logged on or not”, if you ever leave your computer logged out.
- Head to the Settings tab and check “Stop the task if it runs longer than” and set it to “1 hour”. This won’t stop your computer from sleeping, but will stop your computer from thinking a task is still running.
- Head to the Actions tab, hit New, and choose “Start a Program” as your action. Set the Program to
shutdownand the arguments to-s. - Lastly, head to the Triggers tab and click New. Change the schedule to fit whatever you want (say, Daily at 12:00AM), and hit OK. Hit OK again at the next window and your task should be saved in Task Scheduler.
That’s it. Now your computer should shut down and wake up on your own schedule.
On a Mac
This process is much easier on a Mac than on Windows. To set it up on OS X:
- Open up System Preferences and click Energy Saver.
- In the bottom right corner, click the Schedule button.
- Check the box next to “Start up or wake” to schedule when your computer turns on and the checkbox beneath it to schedule when you computer goes to sleep, restarts or shuts down. You can set the schedules for specific days, every day, just weekdays or weekends only.
- Once you’ve made all your choices, click the OK button.
Note that if you’re setting schedules on a Mac laptop, it will need to be connected to power for these schedules to function.
There are a number of different ways you could do this, too, like using previously mentioned WakeupOnStandby, but this is a nice low hassle method that doesn’t require any extra software.
Cheers,
Lifehacker
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