EnQue Software and Consulting Services Route 1 Box 116C Pleasant Hill, MO 64080 Voice/Fax : 816-987-5709 24-Hour BBS: 816-353-0991 First, let's dispense with the legal mumbo-jumbo in English. Though EnQue Software strives to provide the highest quality software products at the lowest possible price (in this case free), we cannot accept responsibility for any damages that may be incurred by their use. As with any drive utility, it is strongly recommend that you back up your data before use. This program is FREEWARE and may be copied and distributed without charge to anyone and everyone. We would love to see thousands, even millions of people use this program. This program must not be sold for profit. It may be included with other products, commercial or otherwise, as long as this text file is included, and both it and the program are not modified in any way. ------------------------------------------------------------ Most IBM and compatible PC computers shipped in the last several years use IDE hard disks. Many of these hard disks have built in power saving features, where the drive "spins down" after a certain amount of time. This feature is especially useful for computers that must remain on for long periods of time, such as BBS's and computer-driven FAX and voice mail systems. However, it is seldom used except in notebook computers. With this program you can now take advantage of this feature effortlessly. This program is not a TSR and consumes no memory. Simply include the following line in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. SLEEP C 10 The first parameter specifies the drive and can be either C or D. If you have two drives, simply add a line for the `Physical' D drive. The drives may be partitioned, but are still two Physical C and D drives as far as the program is concerned. The second parameter is the timeout in minutes. This can be between 1 and 15. After this amount of time, if no disk activity has occurred, you hard disk will "spin down". In other words, the drive motor will shut off. As soon as your computer needs to access the disk, the drive will "spin up" and proceed as normal. Depending on your hard disk type, this may take anywhere from 2-10 seconds. This cycle then repeats. During normal use, you may never see the drive spin down, but during breaks, lunch, and overnight, the benefit occurs. Don't worry about spinning the drive up and down - they are rated in the tens of thousands of cycles. This is dozens of cycles per day for years - more than the life of most PC's. If you would like to return the drive to the default setting, simply enter 0 as the timeout value. This product does not read or write to your disk at any time, and will automatically detect an IDE drive. If your drive is SCSI or an older AT drive, the program will simply exit with an error message. The program will also tell you if you have an IDE drive that does not support standby mode. It is estimated that it costs America billions of dollars each year just to power computers. While a hard disk consumes much less power than a monitor, it is a major consumer of energy. By using this utility, coupled with common sense actions such as turning off your monitor and turning the speed of your computer down (for systems that have a turbo/normal speed switch) while your computer is unattended can result in significant power savings. So what does this translate into in terms of dollars? Let's say that there are 50 million PC computers that use IDE hard drives. Let's also assume that about 50% of these are left running overnight (which is common practice among many corporations). A typical spinning hard disk uses about 2-4 watts of power. That translates to about 1200 MWH consumed unecessarily spinning hard drives every night: that works out to be over $100,000 a day or nearly $40 million a year! In standby mode, the power consumption of your drive is reduced to about 1/2 watt. That translates to only about $5 million a year, a savings of $35 million! Yes, it's hard to believe that if everyone used this free utility, America alone would save tens of millions of dollars a year! We hope you enjoy this product. We also have several 'C' programming productivity products available for free download on our 24-hour BBS, so feel free to stop by and drop us a line. Or you can send us InterNet mail at either of the following addresses: DrBoyd@aol.com 73670.636@compuserve.com It is a shame that it took this long to become "Green" minded. Soon, all PC's will take advantage of this and other features. Good luck being "GREEN"! Sincerely, Kevin L. Huck Dr. Boyd G. Gafford EnQue Software and Consulting