Be warned!
I’ve had problems of late with Windows Media Center on Windows 7 where on resume from sleep I get a a black screen for around a minute – I’m not the only one but I don’t have a clue what has changed to cause this to start happening.
So, I’ve finally been forced to give MCE Standby Tool a test. I say forced because I have tried to minimise the software installed on my media center machine to reduce the conflicts, reinstall hassle etc.
I have tried MCE Standby Tool in the past on a Vista configuration and I can confirm it did nothing useful for me at all so was not expecting much this time to be honest, although plenty of people swear by it.
Since I last tried it there do appear to be a lot more options which are pretty clear although some remain unclear. For instance the pop up that asks which devices should be allowed to wake the machine up gave a list of “HID Device xxxx” and “HID Device xxx1” straight out of Windows’ internal systems, well I don’t know which HID device is which but there were at least four on the list and as there are only 3 things plugged in that makes it interesting.
Still, reboot as required and we’re away, or not.
Previously, I got a black screen on resume which was clearly Media Center having some sort of display issue, now on reboot I get a black screen – this one is strangely much blacker except for the “Start” menu. No mouse response at all but luckily the three fingered salute worked to show that MST Blanker had crashed which caused MCE Standby tool to crash.
So that made the system much worse, uninstall works nicely though but check carefully that your settings are back where they should be!