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General discussion

Why does my PC keep waking up when I put it to sleep?

Jun 26, 2020 1:46PM PDT

Hi. I have a question that probably has an easy fix. Whenever I use the Windows 10 option to put my computer to sleep, it invariably wakes up on its own three to four hours later, usually in the middle of the night. This happens quite often. Before anyone suggests exorcism, I tried that. It removed the weird sounds coming from the attic, but not the unexplained waking of my computer. It's not the dog; he has his own computer. How do I fix this? It is wired to my cable modem. I ensured there are no tasks set to run (that I know of). It's not a big problem, but it is annoying (much like the noises in the attic). Thanks!
-- Submitted by Emmett G.

Discussion is locked

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Re: wake up
Jun 26, 2020 1:59PM PDT

There are Windows tasks that can do this.

Two questions:
1. Does Event Viewer show anything happening during the night?
2. Does it happen also if you shut down at the end of the day in stead of setting to sleep. And then I mean a real shutdown with fast startup disabled.

And a third question:
3. Is wake on LAN turned off in the BIOS?

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Still Happening
Jul 5, 2020 1:08PM PDT

The event viewer doesn't show anything, I did notice that wake on LAN was enabled. I disabled it and lo and behold it didn't wake up all night, but the next day after waking it up, I tried to put it asleep for the night and it immediately awoke. I tried it again and still just immediately awoke. Hmm.

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There will be tasks set to run
Jun 26, 2020 3:32PM PDT

by the Update Orchestrator service which will run at night if allowed to - use the command powercfg -waketimers in command prompt to see them - and of course schedulled maintenance will run at 03:00AM if you have not turned that off.

The best way to stop anything waking the computer is to disable wake timers altogether, go to Control Panel>Power Options>Change Plan Settings>Change Advanced Power Settings>Sleep>Allow Wake Timers and set to Disabled.

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Love those WAKETIMERS in Windows 10.
Jun 26, 2020 3:42PM PDT

If we google "WAKETIMERS WINDOW 10" we see a lot of discussions about this.

For me, I have to disable those since it's too annoying to find your laptop has run down its battery overnight.

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Disabled Wake-timers
Jul 5, 2020 1:16PM PDT

Okay, I disabled the wake timers as suggested. It seemed to cure my computer from turning back on immediately. The proof will be at night to see if it'll sleep the whole night.

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LASTWAKE
Jun 27, 2020 2:58AM PDT

Thanks. I never looked at these (of course, I don't put the computer to sleep). But there are other powercfg options. /LASTWAKE should tell you if a sleep timer did a wake-up. Also, /SYSTEMSLEEPDIAGNOSTICS sounds interesting.

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Last wake
Jul 5, 2020 1:20PM PDT

Sounds like a sleep study that people take to diagnose sleep apnea. Ha-ha. I will definitely check that when/if it wakes unintentionally. I just woke it up now.

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Thanks..i hope
Jul 4, 2020 6:03AM PDT

My windows7 cpu often turns on by itself over night, so i disabled sleep timer which was on enable. Maybe this does it..

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Going down the list.
Jul 5, 2020 1:13PM PDT

Hi, I tried the first suggestion without success. I'm on to yours. I located the wake timers and disabled them. I didn't even know this existed.

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Sleep
Jun 26, 2020 3:33PM PDT

When you put the pc in sleep turn off your modem.......test.

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Teenagers in the house
Jul 5, 2020 1:24PM PDT

I have teenagers in the house that use the modem at all hours of the night. I was hoping not to have to resort to this. They say they're doing homework, but we all know that's not the case. I just don't want them to call child protective services on me for child cruelty by shutting down the internet. Ha-ha.

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What do you mean by "wake up?"
Jun 26, 2020 6:26PM PDT

Do you mean the fan kicks on and the hard drive starts chattering? Or, do you mean the screen turns on?

I leave my machines running 24/7, but I turn the screen off on the laptop in my bedroom. For some laptops, they have a Fn/Key to do that, and that works fine. But, on machines that don't have that key, I have tried multiple utilities. All of them, on multiple brands of computers on multiple versions of Windows, 95% of the time the screen turns back on one to five minutes later. Running the utility a second time turns it off for the rest of the night.

I have posted in multiple forums, including the authors of some of the utilities, and nobody else appears to see this behavior.

I've just had to live with it. When placing the mouse, I make sure to use the trackpad button to start the utility, so that the mouse is still sitting there when it comes back on, and I can easily reach over and run it the second time.

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Desktop
Jul 5, 2020 1:28PM PDT

Everything kicks on. If I leave the monitor in a wait-state, it turns on as well. I've tried to return it to sleep but will wake up in the morning with my computer also awake. I wouldn't mind it too much except I have a lighted keyboard and mouse (Christmas gift) that lights up the room, even if I do remember to click the monitor off.

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Ethernet
Jun 27, 2020 8:00PM PDT

If the rest of the suggestions haven't panned out and your computer is still acting like it needs a Ghostbuster, try unplugging the ethernet cable right after you put it to sleep, and see if it fixes it. If it does, it's likely the network pinging the computer and causing it to wake. The ethernet controller has a setting to allow network traffic to wake the computer.
Go into device manager and select the network adapters then double click on the ethernet adapter. A window will pop up and on that should be a Power Management tab. On that tab should be a checkbox that says, "Allow this device to wake the computer." Make sure it's unchecked. Then, you can plug your ethernet cable back in at night.

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Good suggestion
Jul 5, 2020 1:29PM PDT

That's my next option.

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why not just turn the computer off?
Jun 30, 2020 1:38PM PDT

I'm actually not being snarky when I ask why don't you just turn the computer off over night rather than putting it to sleep.

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Personal preference
Jun 30, 2020 2:39PM PDT

I'll answer for myself. Other people will have their own reasons.

Part of it is habit. Computers used to take long enough to boot that it was really disruptive to the start of my day to wait for them. When they're already on, I can just sit down and start using them. Boot times are much shorter, but still enough to be an issue.

Second, I donate CPU and GPU cycles to various distributed computing projects. I was doing SETI@Home until they shut down a few months ago. Now I'm doing Einstein@Home, and I used to do Folding@Home.

Finally, there's the stress on the machine from heating/cooling cycles. Turning them off and on once or twice a day is probably not much stress. Doing so several times a day is probably not good for the electronics. Nor, on the motors of the hard drives, spinning them back up to speed. Electronics would probably prefer to remain at a steady state. The moving parts that could wear out from continuous use are the bearings on fans and hard drives. In my experience, neither fails very often. I've only ever had to replace a couple of fans, and have only had one or two hard drives fail in the last 10 years.

As for electricity, I'm in Texas, so compared to my a/c, the electricity usage of my computers is probably in the noise. Yeah, it would save a few bucks. But, for me, the convenience is worth the few bucks.

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cant wait 40 seconds?
Jul 3, 2020 10:19AM PDT

You can't wait 30 - 40 seconds? Mine boots in just over 30 seconds.
Oh, you are using Apple computer, I get it Happy

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Apple? no, but ...
Jul 3, 2020 1:09PM PDT

... there is my post above that it isn't just about booting. Some of us do more with our machines than just boot it up and shut it down ...
Most of the time I manage to keep some of my processes running for months ... (not just 40 seconds.)

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Shutting down overnight
Jul 3, 2020 11:54AM PDT

I advocate shutting down at night and starting up in the morning.
This refreshes the memory, often clearing bugs that accumulate in RAM (ie programs not closing and using up RAM). Also often it will force an update that is waiting to do a restart. Not to mention it can throw up other issues, like not loading windows on starting up in the morning, better to find this out then rather than in the middle of the day because you succumbed to Windows must restart notification. I could go on.....

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Recommendation to shut down?
Jul 3, 2020 1:19PM PDT

Well, I recall Windows versions before 2000 that would take care of that automatically several times a day. Now, Windows 10, with its desire to update itself, is back there at least once a week, including one or more reboots - unless you get even more devious than MS about it and frustrate it by moving the targets.
Windows versions between 2000 and 7 were reasonably stable and thus would shut down spontaneously (or, as some soreheads call it, "crash") only on very rare occasions. Windows 10, if you run it without access to the internet, is just as good. It is just this modern day obsession with not leaving well enough alone that breaks that good track record. (It isn't just MS that does that - lots of my other software has similar ideas. Any software developer can tell you that even with decent testing you are likely to introduce about as many new bugs with any update as you are fixing - in Physics we call that "entropy."

)

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Distributed computing projects?
Jul 4, 2020 8:17AM PDT

Could it be that one of your distributed computing project applications is waking your computer?

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Distributed computing?
Jul 4, 2020 8:46AM PDT

As a rule, no.
It seems you know one of my favourite passtimes. But normally I just build test environments that just sit on one machine, until it is time to migrate them to the client environment(s).
And the machines that wake up in the middle of load shedding are some others. One of them is sending a reconnect task to the irrigation computer triggrred by task manager, but that is under instruction not to wake up for this. It wouldn't make sense, because that one doesn't have battery backup - there are pumps in the irrigation system that would blow the inverters to hell and gone, anyway.

But a nice idea!

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Like Mighty Drake C ...
Jul 3, 2020 1:04PM PDT

... my preference is to keep it running. It isn't just the time to boot, it also is the time to open all the windows I work with (my task bar shows me upwards of two dozen entries at an one time.) to get back there after a reboot takes between 30 and 60 minutes, and I am not keen to go through that too often.

Now in my part of the world the monopoly electricity provider has neglected the power grid to the extent that they run out of capacity from time to time. Their way to resolve that is to shut down the consumers, one suburb at a time, for four hours.

So, if your livelihood depends on being able to compute you have a setup with large batteries and inverters that make mains power (or a reasonable lookalike) out of the power in the batteries. Once power is restored your batteries will be recharged.

If, like me, you run, say, a half dozen PCs you probably don't have enough battery power to run them all, including peripherals etc. for the four hours (plus safety margin.) So, not to lose your place, you put computers to sleep (rather than switching them off) before you retire. The idea is that you can run two computers for the four hours and there is enough power left to support the sleep mode of the other four.

That's what I use sleep mode for.

Of course, it doesn't help at all if one of your computers wakes up and sits around using up a full load all by itself, only to drain its battery, so that it and any other machine on the same battery will unceremoniously come to a full stop, flying in the face of Windows's desire to be shut down properly or - in the event of an update - break that update in the process. You have seen the message "Do not power down your machine. There is an important update running." When this happened to me once in the middle of a seminar I was running I let the audience take a vote if this meant that I had to throw the computer out the window using an extension chord ...

Ironically, it was the dreaded Windows 10 updates that woke up my machines at night. There is a setting somewhere that allows or disallows waking up a computer for "important" updates. When I discovered that I dug around and found that setting and turned it off. Now I can't recall where that was ...

The obvious other possibilities are LAN, mouse or keyboard. Mouse and keyboard are a must if you live close to the San Andreas fault or any other source of movement in your building structure (mines, volcanoes, train tracks or airports, etc.) LAN is a good idea even if there shouldn't be anything on your network.

So, to finish my story above: The computer that wanted to do an update woke up, started draining the battery, found that my network settings didn't allow it to download the update anyway, and stayed awake, stealing the energy from the other machines that were trying to do useful work - and thus the lot of them came down when the power ran out.

(Maybe I should also unplug the network cable when I put a machine to sleep ...)

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Sympathy Gerdd....
Jul 3, 2020 11:11PM PDT

Blarry Eskom

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Thanks!
Jul 4, 2020 12:43AM PDT

I am now looking for computers (or inverters) that run on braaiwood.
(Petrol is too expensive, solar, too, if you need more batteries for the night, and coal too wet -says Eishkom.)

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Long ago DEC figured this out! Leave them on!
Jul 3, 2020 5:41PM PDT

Back in the ancient days of DEC computers, we had a system that used a large DEC mainframe with thousands of logic IC's. They required that the power be applied 24/7/365 - NEVER turn it off. They had found that the temperature and voltage stresses from nightly off cycles were the cause of most of their hardware problems. When the technicians came to repair it, they would bring multiple full sets of cards so they could keep replacing cards until it worked - and then it was in the always powered on state until the next failure (hopefully many months later). We had custom hardware that also had thousands of logic IC's that interfaced to the DEC's, but our management insisted we turn them off on the weekends. We usually spent all of Monday and most of Tuesday getting all of our electronics back up again. When we pointed out that DEC left their equipment on all weekend and didn't have any problems, management didn't want to do it until they saw all of the wasted repair time and finally gave up. After leaving our equipment on all weekend (with 24/7 security guards to make sure there wasn't a fire the first time), everything was running 100% first thing Monday morning. We never turned them off on the weekends again.

While today's systems don't have thousands of IC's anymore, the ball grid attachments are very sensitive to thermal and mechanical shocks; I'm sure the voltage shocks are the same as always. Ever since my experience with DEC's systems, I've left my systems in sleep (very low power on) and never had a motherboard or other electronics failure. I have an old system still running after 11 years like that.

Which would you rather pay for - a few dollars in electricity over the lifetime of the system or hours of restoring / rebuilding a new system at a time not of your choosing? For me, the small cost of electricity is money well spent.

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I like the DEC approach ...
Jul 3, 2020 6:03PM PDT

... but where did you get uninterrupted power from?

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Generators...
Jul 4, 2020 11:33AM PDT

If they were anything like the Control Data supers I've seen, they likely used 400hz generators that were powered by a combination of the grid and "instant-on" backup generators. Converting the power to 400Hz made filtering it easier and more stable, from what I'm told. Also, military ships (where some of them were placed) used that type of power, so interfacing was easier.

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400 Hz power
Jul 4, 2020 11:57AM PDT

Yes, IBM also used that for some of their S/370 mainframes back then.