I use my cellphone. With the way my laptop tends to heat up if left on too long, I am not sure I would want to leave it on overnight just to use it as an alarm clock.

EracMan

Considering the song used in the screenshot... I REALLY hope this was a canned image provided by the developer.

Bluesk1d

@ub: I always permanently disable automatic sleep on my laptops, and I made a program that keeps the system from going into standby even if it wanted to.

Also if an alarm program is too crappy to wake itself from sleep you probably shouldn't be using it. It is trivial to get a machine to wake up from sleep at a desired time.

Task manager->create a task->properties->settings->Wake the computer to run this task.

Even if the computer went into low battery standby, it will wake up to run the alarm event, and you should get some amount of alarm before it falls asleep again.

johnsmith1234

Or better.
A real alarm.

*gasp*

Saves power. Much more effective (Listening to songs I enjoy? Why would that wake me up? :/)

Sanjo

Or you know. Just use your cellphone. These days EVERYONE has they cellphone glued to their palm like it's a new appendage to their bodies.

jabber

Yeah, neat idea, I almost wrote one of these for personal use when I was in school.

But who can really convince their college laptop to defeat its own power-saving features on a regular enough basis to function as their only alarm clock?

That one time you leave that baby sitting on your bed unplugged or it switches back to "battery max" on its own, and you could be snoring through 3/4s of your final Stat exam.

ub

@Bluesk1d: Totally! I mean who maps a drive to the letter "Y" anyways?!

CaptLonestar

FYI. It appears that the site has been lifehacked. I get a temporary out of service message (Due to maintenance or capacity problems according to the yahoo error message) when attempting to hit the site.

EracMan

My workstation isn't close enough to my bed to get me up, unless I turned the volume up enough to wake up the neighborhood. But I have an very nice radio alarm clock that allows setting different wake-up times for each day of the week, with a remarkably simple and fast user interface to set things up (two big concentric rotary knobs).

I love this thing and can recommend it highly.

[www.americaninnovative.com]

No connection to the company, other than as a satisfied customer.

dwhitman

I totally used this exact program to help survive my undergrad years. I once had a "regular" alarm clock, but #1 after a while, I would get used to the sound of the alarm and it would no longer guarantee waking me; #2 I had at least one jerk roommate who would shut off my alarm if it woke him up, and go back to sleep leaving me to blissfull dreaming and late arrivals for morning classes.

Using the College Alarm clock, I set it the song to some heavy metal and set the speakers to a high enough decibel that the initial shock was all I needed to bolt out of bed.

Worked like a charm.

Red_Flag

@Bluesk1d: no, what better to make you get the hell out of bed and turn the alarm off? =)

summerblink

I have an old, plugged-in alarm clock that I use. If, for some reason, I can't use that, my cell phone is right there, easy enough to use. I'd rather let my computer do its own thing. But, if this is your thing, this seems like a good enough program to get the job done.

Platypus Man

[www.filedropper.com]
Here's the file for anyone that wants it (:

Firehead03

@Red_Flag: nice to hear from the developer in the comments!

Seriously, why would i trust my wake-up call to the least reliable piece of hardware/software i own?

yagameister

A five year old is the best alarm clock providing it's light outside. Her internal body clock wakes her up as soon as it's light, and I havent figured out where her "snooze" button is yet. There's nothing more likely to wake me up than small fingers peeling back my eyelids to see if I'm still sleeping.

englishman

I used this 6 years ago when I was a freshman in college. It worked very well for me.

criticman

@ Sanjo: listening to songs you enjoy! no way. You're supposed to put something terrible on, like Britney and Madonna, to get you to greet the day with gusto! I'd leap out of bed to silence music I hate, every time.

dylan_k

can we not have any more alarm clocks on lifehacker now? We get it.

caedus

I agree that this wouldn't work particularly well as a morning alarm clock, but it looks like a good alarm for waking up from an office nap, which I seem to take every day (esp if I have pasta for lunch).

DangerousLiberal

Seems like a conflict of interest to serve up tips that promote energy efficiency (e.g., Local Cooling) and then have tips that encourage you to leave your computer on 24 hours a day.

kaffa2

I've been using this for years as a secondary alarm should my alarm clock die or in a sleepy stupor I shut it off.

A sudden blaring of death metal is better than a Red Bull to get the day going.

Klashe

You could just write a script to open iTunes and play.
See here: [www.downloadsquad.com]

isewise

Softpedia mirror (site appears to be down):
[www.softpedia.com]

While it does run in Wine, its apparent inability to produce sound output makes it rather useless.

toaste

In order to cut down on power consumption, I don't leave my computer on all night. However, my clock radio and my cell phone with alarms set a few minutes apart wake me up every time.

Morton Fox

my solution was using windows me (yeah - year 2000!) with scheduled tasks and an mp3. not that i hear it very often, but if i ever hear that static x sound we used, my stomach churns pavlovian style thinking about 830 chemistry.

Khamel

Used this for years, all through college. It's the best because if you set it to use beep it uses the computer's internal sound and it won't matter if your sound card is missing/busted or you forgot to unmute your computer before bed.

Also, it's loud and annoying, and getting up and having to run to the computer (no shortcut of turning the speaker off!) sure as hell gets you up. I use it as my emergency alarm for when my other 2 or 3 fail. Yes, that happens.

nmaster64

If you have a Dell of recent vintage, you can set the BIOS to turn your computer on during weekdays or every day, whichever you prefer. You can use this to save energy, turning on the computer just before College Alarm is set to ring.

Mark

@yagameister:

Not sure how you inferred I was the developer, but no, I'm not, just a former user. I say former, because it only really fit the situation in college, where each day of the week I had a radically different schedule. That and the head of my bed was right next to my computer desk.

I left my desktop on 24/7 (like basically every other CompSci major that ran any sort of servers), and on campus electricity only failed when there was a catastrophic power failure; it was more likely to lose internet. So, not really much of an issue for the uses I was using CAC for.

Red_Flag

Random alarm clock tip: if you have a radio in your alarm clock, put on some static. Much more relaxed to wake up to than: "BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP".

Protector one

I use my cellphone with multi times set every 10 minutes. The first one never works :)

ChambrasWeed

I used this all throughout my time at uni and it worked like a charm, thumbs up. I'm surprised that this is still the best app out there though?

robgough

Doesn't work for me for some reason. I set the alarm for 5 mins in the future and nothing happened. Also, it randomly gives me an error saying "There was an error in Beeping, I'll be damned if I know why"

xmonster

Nice, I used to use scheduled tasks to play mp3's for my alarms! Stefan Please consider the environment before printing this email. This email may contain legally privileged confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient please delete immediately without disclosing its contents to any other person. Unless stated to the contrary, any opinions or comments are personal to the writer and do not represent the official view of the company. This email has been checked for viruses and malicious content but should be independently checked as we can take no responsibility for computer viruses that might be transferred by way of this e-mail. Solsis is a Limited company registered in England. Registered number: 3216791. Registered office: Waterside Park, Cookham Road, Bracknell, Berkshire RG12 1RB. VAT Registration No. 642082068

CalvinCalliope

I use Foobar2000's Scheduler extension [www.hydrogenaudio.org]
I'd always rather built-in functionality like an extension than a whole separate program to do it.
@Sanjo: Simple solution: get some music you hate!

Puff0rx

I've used this years ago, but it lacks 2 key features that some people may require.

Citrus alarm clock (google) and Daily alarm clock ([seanregan.com]) provide a "fade in" alarm to gently wake you up. I actually fade in my alarm volume over the course of an hour. This is a mandatory feature for me.

Daily alarm clock also has a feature that disallows you to turn off the alarm without inputting a random string of numbers when it goes off.

I prefer daily alarm clock's interface, etc. It's wonderful.

tashi

I use the Alarm Clock of Justice v2.1. It has all the features of College Alarm Clock plus many more. Including automatically waking from standby or hibernate, fading volume in, auto unmute, auto volume max, can be setup to run a batch file in addition to just playing music. I activate the alarm at night then put my computer into standby. I have my Alarm Clock of Justice set up on my laptop, to wake from sleep, to fade in music to max volume for 5 minutes so it just doesn't start blasting, and start firefox and load a folder of bookmarks. I highly recommend checking it out.

bjohnson1417

Alternative for Mac OS X is MP3 Alarm Clock (http://jbenjamin.org/software/Software.html )

CaseyEpeius