Dell Command PowerShell Auto-On BIOS Feature Explained

Affected Products:

• Dell Command | PowerShell Provider

Auto-On BIOS option sets the time of day when the user would like the computer to turn on automatically. The user has the choice to disable this option, select every day to turn on, select only weekdays to turn on, and select specific days to turn on the computer 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 screenshot depicts how the Auto-On BIOS attribute is availed in BIOS F2 screen setup. The user can set Auto-On Hour, Auto-On Minute, and select AM or PM. There are four options namely Disabled, Every Day, Weekdays, and Select Days. When a user has selected Select Days, the check boxes to custom select days of the week becomes active, and the user has the liberty to select only the days they require when the computer turns ON automatically.

Dell Command Powershell Provider (DCPP) intuitively provides to the user the Auto-On option. It has diligently tried to keep the command-line interface in DCPP as simple as possible and as close to the F2 screen as possible. When the user goes to PowerManagement category in DCPP, and does a dir the below screen would be visible:

As screen in the screenshot above, the user is presented initially with three attributes namely Auto-On, AutoOnHr and AutoOnMn.

For Auto-On attribute the user has four choices similar to the BIOS F2 screen namely 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 the user chooses the Auto-On attribute to Select Days, seven new attributes become visible namely AutoOnSun, AutoOnMon, AutoOnTue, AutoOnWed, AutoOnThur, AutoOnFri and AutoOnSat.

The above attributes have only either of the values Enabled and Disabled which lets the user choose the days where Auto-On should occur.

In the above example, the user wants Auto-On to be disabled on Thursday.

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

Below shows the utilization of wildcard to display contents (this is applicable to other attributes also). Also shown is the way to display possible values for the Auto-On attribute: