Dell Command | Powershell Provider 1.0 AutoOn feature

AutoOn BIOS option sets the time of day when the user would like the system to turn on automatically. The user has the choice to disable this option, select everyday to turn on, select only weekdays to turn on and select which required days to turn on the PC automatically. The user does not have a choice to set the time for each day of the week and there is only one option to set auto on hour and minute which is common across all days of the week

The above screen shot depicts how AutoOn BIOS attribute is availed in BIOS F2 screen setup. The user can set AutoOn Hour,AutoOn Minute and select AM/PM. There are 4 options viz ‘Disabled’,’Every Day’,’Weekdays’ and ‘Select Days’. When user has selected ‘Select Days’, the check boxes to custom select days of week becomes active and user has liberty to select only the days they require when system turns ON automatically(as shown below).

Dell Command Powershell Provider 1.0(DCPP) intuitively provides to the user the AutoOn option. It has been very diligently tried to keep the command line interface in DCPP as simple as possible and as close to F2 screen as possible.When the user navigates to PowerManagement category in DCPP and does a ‘dir’ the below screen would be visible:

As screen in the screen shot above, the user is presented initially with 3 attributes viz ‘AutoOn’,’AutoOnHour’ and ‘AutoOnMinute’.

For ‘AutoOn’ attribute the user has four choices similar to BIOS F2 screen viz ‘Disabled’,’Every Day’,’Weekdays’ and ‘Select Days’. When the user selects ‘Select Days’ the below output change occurs as depicted below:

As seen above when user chooses ‘AutoOn’ attribute to ‘Select Days’, 7 new attributes becomes visible viz ‘AutoOnSunday’,’AutoOnMonday’,’AutoOnTuesday’,’AutoOnWednesday’,’AutoOnThursday’,’AutoOnFriday’ and ‘AutoOnSaturday’.

The above attributes have only either of the values ‘Enabled’ and ‘Disabled’ which lets the user choose/unchoose days wherein AutoOn should occur.An example is shown below:

In the above example, the user wants AutoOn to be disabled on Thursday.

DCPP also supports a custom function named ‘Set-DellAutoOnForSelectDays’ which intuitively allows the user to cascade multiple weekday calls and automatically sets AutoOn to ‘Select Days’. This custom function is imported as part of DCPP 1.0 module.An example is shown below:

NOTE: If either Admin or System password is set then the password has to be provided along with ‘Set’ commands with a –Password switch.