Download files while sleep mode

Those of us rocking the 56K dial up modem know the troubles of attempting to download the latest movies over our connection. By the time Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2 finishes buffering to my hard drive, Bella will be in the nursing home…and she’s immortal! While your first step at a remedy for slow downloads might be to update to a WI-FI network, there’s also a way to download files overnight, so that you don’t have to sit at your desk monitoring progress while the creatures of the night circle overhead.

Movies, games, torrents, and other files are large and can take some time to download. Depending on your Internet connection speed, the amount of other users connected to that provider, and quality of download site, you could be looking at a download that teeters into hours. If your computer turns off or goes into sleep mode, your download will likely stop and you’ll be greeted with frowns in the morning instead of excitement. Your download might start up the next time you power on your computer but you’ve already wasted a night by that point. In order to download files overnight, you have to make some alterations to the power settings.

Your power settings are crucial to extending the life of your computer, especially laptops. If you plan on downloading a file overnight, you have to make changes to settings of when your computer powers off.

To access this information, go to Start>Control Panel>Power Options and you’ll see the particular plan settings.

It’s safe to turn off the Monitor and it’s actually recommended to save battery life but you’ll want to change “turn off hard disks”, “system standby”, and “system hibernation” to never. Changing these drop-down menus ensures that your computer won’t fire down in the middle of the download process. Remember, you’ll want to change these settings back once you’ve downloaded your vampire love story so that your everyday browsing activities don’t drain the life of your battery or system resources.

As an alternative to changing your power settings every time a teen drama gets made into a movie, there are several apps you can download that will leave your computer on during the duration of a download then shut down afterwards. Firefox for instance has a program called AutoShutDown that has a toggle to indeed “shutdown computer when download ends.” Once you’ve mastered the user interface, downloading programs becomes an efficient process.

Some things you should remember when downloading overnight is that your computer is going to be working overnight, a third shift if you will and it’s important to keep conditions pleasant. Store the computer in a cool room and if you wake up in the middle of the night to bats flying off your window, take a sneak peek to make sure everything is still operating smoothly. Another thing to take into consideration is that if you’re downloading on a peer-to-peer site, if the user you’re downloading from goes offline, the process will likely be interrupted….oh and always (remember to only download legal content or something.)

Just remember that downloading warez is a risky business and you should always take precautions before installing any software.