Standby Stopper

Given the increasingly higher number of reports detailing the causes and effects of climate change on our environment, plenty of companies try to take their fair share of measures by starting small and limiting the idle power usage of the devices they design in an attempt to reduce users’ carbon emissions. The issue with this approach arises when users are no longer allowed to adjust the way their purchased products function, which is where Standby Stopper comes into play.

While environmental issues are best tackled by all parties involved, big and small, it can be difficult to determine where the line should be drawn in terms of preventing the worsening of ongoing problems without affecting our efficiency regarding professional and personal aspects of our lives.

In this sense, supranational organizations the likes of the European Union have a tendency to instill regulations whose measures many corporations would otherwise not take, such as making electronics turn off after a set amount of time sitting unused.

One company that decided to abide by these rules makes high quality desktop speakers under the brand known as Creative. Despite their sizable set of features, the ability to disable the automatic turn-off function after a certain period of sitting idly seems to be missing, which can cause issues with delays in playing back short notification tones when sitting away from the desktop and waiting for important messages.

Since modifying the internal component is not only an overly complicated task that also happens to void one’s warranty, an option would be to play the short Beep tone through the program and then monitor the amount of time it takes for the speakers to deactivate before either playing an unobtrusive low frequency tone in the background on a loop or create a script that initializes the same sound at a shorter length to ensure the devices stay on.

If your speakers happen to have the same behavior as Creative’s high-end line of products, Standby Stopper might be a good place to start, considering some users have been having issues with their design decisions.