Having problems with automatic start up / TV alarm clock.

[SMMack]

Hey guys, I've been wanting to have my favourite TV show as an alarm clock, so that I don't turn my alarm off and go straight back to sleep anymore. I want to make it as easy as possible to stay awake in the morning as I have been having problems with bad sleep habits for years. However it seems that windows was highly against this idea, as it is not an easy task to get working.

I have managed to set up an old laptop so that after I put it into sleep mode it wakes itself up at 8am and starts playing the selected .mp4 file. However I cannot get it to turn the display on so that I can actually watch the thing.
As there is no option to turn the display on normally I created a task option to run a Nircmd batch file to turn it on using commands:
@echo on
nircmd.exe monitor on

If I reverse these to automatically turn the monitor off, it works fine (in terms of turning the monitor off that is) however when the batch file shown runs, it turns the monitor on (as wanted) but then turns the monitor off again after 2 seconds. Am I missing a command in task manager or in the batch file to keep the monitor on for at least the time needed to watch a video that is longer than 2 seconds?

Fyi my monitor is set to never turn the display off, if any other information is required just ask.

 

[gardenman]

Hi, maybe you can use powercfg.exe. I know you said you already have it to set never time out, but give this a try anyway. Examples on these pages:

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/quick-tip-change-monitor-timeout-from-command-line/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36263756/how-to-set-monitor-timeout-to-never-using-powershell

Another idea, try running Don't Sleep from your batch file.