Falling asleep on the job (task) October 26, 2009

Posted by keithga in MDT 2010, VBscript.
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ZZzzzzzz…… (New for MDT 2010)

One of the new features of Windows 7 is a new aggressive power management policy. For machines that are plugged in, the new “Balanced” default policy will put a machine to sleep in 30 minutes. For Windows Vista, the default was 60 minutes.

For Deployments, that’s a problem if you have application installs that take longer than 30 minutes, like Microsoft Office 2007, with all the service packs. Half way through the deployment, the install pauses because the machine went to sleep.

I first noticed this in early tests of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010. I had written a utility for a similar problem back when I worked for Microsoft IT. It uses a Win32 API call:  Win32 SetThreadExecutionState()

It’s a simple C/C++ call:

SetThreadExecutionState( ES_CONTINUOUS | ES_SYSTEM_REQUIRED );

This command resets the idle timer of the OS, and forces the machine to stay in a state while the Litetouch Task Sequence is running.

Updated (11/3/09):

KeepAlive was added to MDT 2010 in the Microsoft.BDD.Utility.dll file, you can see it being called in the litetouch.wsf script:

' Ensure that this machine does *not* go to sleep while running the task sequence steps.
On error resume next
oUtility.BDDUtility.KeepAlive
On error goto 0

Keith

Keith Garner is a Deployment Specialist with Xtreme Consulting Group