I am running a mythbuntu box in my living room and until now I use mythwelcome and suspend to put the computer in sleep. However, this is still rather time consuming and I am now speculating where do I get in power consumption if I simply power down graphic card and spin-down harddrives? What else can I do? Power-down CPU? Can I also power down case fans and prehaps cpu fan or do I risk frying up something?

My aim would be to get the machine quite quickly as silent as possible and also recover as fast as possible, like normal VCR and of course simultaneously reduce power consumption as much as possible. With suspend I need unfortunately quite a long time powering up some services, like X, initiate video tuners again and stuff like that. It takes irritatingly long so I am thinking of alternatives to get into more VCR like on/off behaviour...

Any tips and what commands can I use to power down stuff?

resuming from suspend can take as little as 3 seconds (main culprit is joining wifi again).
resuming from hibernate can take 30 seconds, and I understand that can be irritating.

What kind of timing do you get?
And are you recovering from suspend or hibernate. i.e if you take the battery off the laptop and unplug the power you crash it or not?

I am using suspend and it is easily 30 sec. It's not a laptop - it is a desktop-PC in living room - no wifi but ethernet. The problem are
actually peripherals which do not survive suspend. Let's say DVB-S2 tuner for instance. For that I additionally use decrypting utilitity which
is a really low starter. It means that before suspend I need to remove dvb modules and for that I need to shutdown myth-backend service. Then I need
to shutdown sascd and remove the modules. Same with lirc. Suspend is still rather rapid - it is the waking up that takes such a long time. So all in
all I am barely faster than with normal boot.

I am really looking for other alternatives not suspend...