What is waking up Windows 7?

[Shadrack]

Hi!

I have Windows 7 Home Premium 64 and it suffers from insomnia!

Every time it goes to sleep seems like after a few hours it will randomly come back on. I have the power settings set to put it back to sleep in a few minutes, but this is especially annoying at night (and is making the girlfriend cranky!).

There are no hardwired network connections (it is WiFi). I don't think that the mouse or keyboard is waking it. Some scheduled task or something? Please help me troubleshoot this issue.

Thanks!

-Shad

[Pharos]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but your WiFi connection can also wake up your system. Go to Start > Control Panel > System & Security > System > Device Manager. Find your WiFi device there and double click it. Go to "Power Management" tab and see if you can untick the box that says "Allow this device to wake this computer".

[Evolution]

If it wakes up on its own you can type powercfg -lastwake in the command prompt to see what last woke your computer up. You could try powercfg -devicequery wake_armed to see which devices are set to wake your computer. You can also disable wake timers altogether.

[Roger H. Veteran]

Evolution beat me to it, the lastwake command tells you why the system woke:

As you can see my LCD Lid is why it was woken last wake because i opened my laptop and started typing this post

[dmb219]

  On 07/10/2010 at 20:01, Pharos said:

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but your WiFi connection can also wake up your system. Go to Start > Control Panel > System & Security > System > Device Manager. Find your WiFi device there and double click it. Go to "Power Management" tab and see if you can untick the box that says "Allow this device to wake this computer".

This worked for me, the network card woke the computer all the time (even without wifi).

[LiquidSolstice]

I know in my BIOS I can set what I want to allow the computer to be woken up by (network, keyboard, mouse, etc)

[Riggers]

This is just a possibility, no proof or anything.

Go to Task Scheduler->Microsoft->Windows->The entry "Application Experience" has 3 entries AitAgent and ProgramDataUpdater which are both set to run daily at different times. ProgramDataUpdater starts rundll32.exe. Might be worth a shot right clicking each task and disabling it, you can allways re-enable them if you so wish!

[Lazure]

Sometimes your USB mouse or keyboard might trigger a wakeup. Follow the instructions in Pharos' post, but look in your HID input devices section where your mouse and keyboard are at and look for similar options to prevent them from waking the computer.

[Raa]

My network card used to be a bit tricky and woke up my system.

Now I find my USB hub is causing issues and wakes my system up sometimes, or simply won't let it goto sleep after the first sleep...

[cleverclogs]

I found my wireless mouse/keyboard (MS laser desktop 6000 v3) was waking my PC, so I disabled its ability to do so in device manager --> properties of selected device --> power management. Turned this off and it's as good as gold. ON a side note, the USB hub on my monitor is capable of waking the computer when the monitor is switched on, which is actually a fairly nifty "feature".

[Shadrack]

Thanks for the help, guys!

It looks like media center is waking my computer up:

This is what I get when I run that powercfg -lastwake

Wake History Count - 1
Wake History [0]
  Wake Source Count - 1
  Wake Source [0]
    Type: Wake Timer
    Owner: [PROCESS] \Device\HarddiskVolume4\Windows\System32\services.exe
    Owner Supplied Reason: Windows will execute '\Microsoft\Windows\Media Center
\mcupdate_scheduled' scheduled task that requested waking the computer.

I found the solution to disabling this here:

http://www.beirtech.com/blogs.php?action=view&bid=6

[Electric Jolt]

You should have your Media Center PC waking to get the guide information and to do other related tasks, especially if you have a Media Center Extender such as an Xbox 360 that you use frequently and need Media Center. It would be a hassle to always turn it on before using the Media Center Extender. Unless you do not have one or rarely use it. :)

[Shadrack]

  On 08/10/2010 at 14:13, Electric Jolt said:

You should have your Media Center PC waking to get the guide information and to do other related tasks, especially if you have a Media Center Extender such as an Xbox 360 that you use frequently and need Media Center. It would be a hassle to always turn it on before using the Media Center Extender. Unless you do not have one or rarely use it. :)

I don't really use it. My TV is DirecTV (dish) and it is not compatible with Media Center. On my XBox I watch some xvids but I can do that w/o the Media Center interface.