my computer won't stay asleep

[minmaster]

i have a vista home premium PC that just won't stay asleep. it goes to sleep fine, usually i do this before going to bed, but in the middle of the night sometimes early morning, the computer wakes up by itself and is stuck on the log-in screen.

i never had this problem on XP but on vista, it's been happening since day 1. i'm guessing it's a process that is trying to connect online for updates that's causing this, but the only culprit i can think of is my media center downloading guide listing updates, so i disabled it but it still does this.

anyone else have similar problems or know how to fix this?

PS i already have wake on LAN options checked off.

 

[corkyg]

Also consider turning off mouse movement as a waker upper. But, waking up is better than not waking up.

Why not turn off the sleep function and simply turn the monitor off?

 

[masteryoda34]

See if it still happens with mouse and keyboard unplugged.

 

[minmaster]

i checked off "allow this device to wake up computer" for mouse, but not for keyboard because i use my keyboard to wake up my PC from sleep mode. i am convinced it's not the mouse or keyboard though.

i checked in my events viewer for power troubleshooting notes, and all of my intended wake ups have been via USB device (likely my keyboard) but the ones that wake up in the middle of the night doesn't say what woke it up. i'm guessing it's a software that's trying to connect at a certain time for updates. however, i find it odd that a system that is sleeping and have no power to memory or cpu can send/receive a command to wake up the computer.

i prefer sleep to turning off monitor for noise and power saving issues. just turning the monitor off would make it pointless for what i want to achieve here.

 

[nickbits]

My money is on the mouse, keyboard or NIC.

On my comp if I have mouse wake disabled, the mouse will still wake it up if keyboard is enabled. I think this is because both use the same transceiver and it can't really tell what is what.

Check your NIC on the power settings tab and on the advanced tab, look for anything like "WOL, wake, etc" and set to None.

 

[minmaster]

i already said in my original post i have wake on LAN disabled. same with mouse. keyboard i need it on to wake up the computer.

 

[Rottie]

I had same problem like yours I have asked every forums on other websites but some people think it might be nVidia GPU that wakes my notebook and wont even go sleep so I am not sure how I did disable nvidia and finally noticed my notebook went to sleep like a baby for the first time.

 

[nickbits]

Originally posted by: minmaster
i already said in my original post i have wake on LAN disabled. same with mouse. keyboard i need it on to wake up the computer.

Did you try disabling the keyboard? You don't NEED it to wake, you can use the power button.

 

[minmaster]

i have found the culprit. it did it again overnight, at the same 3:00 AM as it does all the time according to my event viewer. the wake source was something called RTC, real time clock. i googled it and a lot of other people have this problem and they also wake up in the middle of the night as well. this seems to be more of a BIOS issue than vista but i haven't found the solution yet. of course i have already made sure all wake options are turned off in the BIOS/CMOS settings.

EDIT: i think i found the solution. involved registry editing to disable wake request. i'll have to verify tomorrow morning, i hope this works.

 

[minmaster]

ugh still woke up at 3AM. same RTC event woke it up. my mobo bios has no options to change RTC settings. at least this is 99% surely not a software/OS issue.

 

[Athena]

We discovered that if we used a PS/2 adapter for a USB keyboard, it would keep our machines machines from going to sleep. Plugging the mouse into an actual USB port and disabling mouse wakeup fixed that.

We still have a couple of XP machines though that won't go to sleep on their own; taking the shutdown option to sleep works but they never go to sleep on their own.

I did find a reference to a issue with PCI express video cards but these are AGP cards so no joy.

It's very frustrating because one of them went to sleep on its own until we wiped it and reinstalled XP -- no hardware changes, just a clean OS

 

[minmaster]

finally fixed this issue. it was fixed by going into bios and actually turning REMOTE WAKE - ON instead of OFF which makes no sense how that would stop the RTC from waking up the PC. oh well at least it works!