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My Windows 10 Home laptop wakes up (I prefer sleep, instead of shutdown, when I am away from my computer) a few times every day on its own though I disable "wake timers" and do my best to prevent this. The fan and hard disk often wake me up in the morning. So, every few months, I get frustrated and try again to fix this (e.g., I have tried this, and have even called Microsoft and followed their advice), but never succeed.

So, is this normal?

I.e., if I buy a brand new Windows 10 Home laptop today and disable "wake timers", is it still likely to wake itself up more than 100 times over the next year?

EDIT: I am hoping that someone who has a few Windows 10 Home PCs using sleep could testify that sleep works fine. You can search for "Power-Troubleshooter" in Event Viewer to see when you have woken. My example snip is below (by the way, the latest 11:05:36 was intentional, but the prior 08:20:10 was not; though not in this snip, all show "Unknown" when I scroll to the "Wake Source" field).

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bobuhito
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3 Answers3

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Step on will be figuring out what woke it up. Run the following in a command window, or in PowerShell

powercfg -lastwake

This will print out what triggered the wake event. Should give you a clue where to start.

Looking at what is 'armed' will only show once the wake event is set. It will not show when another service or task is planning to set one. Perhaps if you ran it immediately before you put it to sleep it may show something.

In any case, once you identify what is waking it (most likely it is something that one of the steps in the process you were following will stop).

In one of my cases it was the dreaded UpdateOrchestrator. In another it was 'wake on LAN', and the network was waking it up. In another it was the darn cat bumping the mouse or walking on the keyboard at night giving a USB wake event...

Good Luck, G^2

texasbubb
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Do you have any LAN plugged in to your laptop...magic packets can wake up the PC. Try this : Open Device Manager > Network Adapters > Right click your LAN adapter eg. "Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller" > Properties> Advanced tab > Property: Wake on Magic Packet, in the dropdown change its value to Disabled

Elmo
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After updating to Windows version 1903 last week and then pausing updates, my computer finally sleeps in, hooray.

So, the answer to my question is yes, but only by pausing updates (which just became possible in version 1903 in May 2019). To confirm this, I unpaused updates yesterday and sure enough my computer woke itself up once despite disabled "wake timers". I still consider this ignoring of the "wake timers" setting a bug, but at least I can now pause updates before traveling to avoid the battery dying.

EDIT: Nevermind! After about a week, my computer started waking up on its own again (with updates still paused, or updates resumed, or paused after resuming to catch up, or...I've also unsuccessfully tried all the standard solutions since then). It's possible that this is someone else's fault (i.e., my computer's manufacturer, Hewlett Packard), but I believe that waking is Microsoft's intentional decision for the security/updating benefit. If so, I wish Microsoft would be more transparent about this!

bobuhito
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