A letter to Larry Hryb, Microsoft’s Major Nelson about how to help save power with the Xbox 360 and Windows Vista Media Center:

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Major,

Just wondering if you can do anything about this.

In a world where more green conscious consumers are wanting to reduce power usage of devices, there is one thing that the Xbox 360 is lacking at the moment when dealing in a Media Center Extender mode… the capability to wake up the Media Center PC if it is in Standby or Hibernate. Can you ask the Xbox and Media Center teams to look into adding this feature into their respective systems?

Making Media Center and extenders easy to use means making sure when (for example) my parents or friends come to visit they can hit the Media Center button on the 360 remote and not have to worry whether the back-end PC was hibernating or not – it should just work.

Seeing as I work in the Networking Industry, I know there is a standard way to do this that Microsoft could incorporate if they are interested in helping save power usage around the world – Wake on LAN, and especially using Magic Packets to wake the specific system. See more information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN

I hope you can do something about this – whilst this issue hasn’t gotten much (if any) airplay at the moment, I am sure if more people were aware it would, and adding this capability early would show Microsoft to be a good global citizen.

Thanks,
Shane.