Windows 7 sleep, why so janky?

[Todd33]

My Win 7 HTPC is for gaming. When I'm done, I put it to sleep. Great so far. But it wakes up unpredictably and doesn't seem to go back to sleep untul I tell it to, ignoring my 15 minute auto sleep.

I can't explain it. I thought it might be my BT mouse, so I turned it to off with the manual switch. I thought maybe it was other PCs waking it up via the network, so I went into advanced mode and turned anything off that might be related.

What am I missing? Why is this simple feature so hard to use reliably? Thanks.

 

[Evander]

go to command prompt and run:
powercfg – lastwake

that will tell you the cause of the wake up. For me, it was Windows Media Center doing some kind of updates and I fixed that with little difficulty (if it's the same for you, you can google it easily enough but I can help if you can't get it)

more info here:
http://www.cravingtech.com/fix-windows-vista7-sleep-mode-from-waking-up-by-itself.html

 

[HippyChippy]

Does your NIC have the wake on LAN enabled? aka Wake on Magic Packet. Try disabling that (under NIC - Power Management )

 

[Todd33]

Thanks for both replies, I'll look at it as soon as I get home.

 

[Sheep]

By chance, did you do an upgrade install of Windows 7 over XP or Vista? I did initially and the PC sleep problems I encountered in XP carried over to Windows 7, oddly enough. It wasn't until I did a completely fresh install that the problems went away and sleep worked as expected.

 

[Todd33]

No, fresh install.