Rather than start off with my questions, I'll just start with what I am trying to do:
I have a music only media computer hooked into my home network. It is tucked away and I primarily access it through remote desktop over my network. And I listen to the music through my Tivo and Media Server. My problem (and this just could be laziness) is that my media computer goes to sleep. I would like to somehow set Media Server to "wake up" at certain times so that when I am home and I try to access my music through Tivo it will see the Media Server without me having to go over to the computer and wake up.
I have seen something about running the server as a service. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but would that mean getting software to manage when it runs and thus solve my problem? I would like to tell the service or server to run at certain times. Is this possible?
I know that I could just tell my computer to never go to sleep or hibernate, but is that good for the computer? Shouldn't it sleep some? Or is that not necessary? I guess those of you who access your Media Server from work during the day always have your computer running.
I appreciate any solutions you might have to offer.