Prevent keyboard from waking laptop

Question

It's hard for me to understand why many laptops these days are designed to be awakened from sleep mode by any key on the keyboard. In the olden days, it wasn't exactly taxing to have to reach for the power button to wake up a laptop. By allowing the entire keyboard to trigger a wake-up, I get plenty of unwanted wake-ups.

To prevent this, I tried the following using my Administrator account.

(1) I tried the first 4-step process at https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/prevent-keyboard-from-waking-laptop/6fd4e751-f2c0-418b-82d9-f340bae14375. In the Device Manager, my keyboard is "Standard PS/2 Keyboard". When right-click the keyboard, however, I do not have have a Power Management option. Hence, I can't complete the process.

(2) I tried the process at https://www.top-password.com/blog/stop-mouse-keyboard-from-waking-computer-in-windows-10. In the Keyboard Properties window, under the General tab, there is supposed to be a "Change settings" button, but I don't have one. Without it, I cannot reveal the "Power Management" tab.

(3) The following site has a procedure similar to (2), but again, I have no Power Management tab, so I can't use the process: https://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/stop-mouse-from-waking-windows-up-from-sleep-mode

(4) Page Is there anyway to stop a Windows 10 laptop from waking up because of accidental keyboard interaction in a bag? mentions "wake on keyboard" but I don't have such a control

Option (1) also a 3-step process using "powercfg", while option (2) also has a process involving the BIOS. Before I attempted either one of those, I wanted to check and ensure that I don't do something terrible to my laptop. Specifically, I don't have a traditional power button. The power button looks and feels like just another key on the keyboard. If I succeed in disabling keyboard wake-up using "powercfg" or the BIOS, will my laptop remain asleep forever?

POSSIBLY RELEVANT DETAILS

• My laptop is a Acer TravelMate P2 P2410-G2-M NX.VGTAA.006

• Following https://www.howtogeek.com/122954/how-to-prevent-your-computer-from-waking-up-accidentally, I got no information about the cause of the wake-up when it is done using the keyboard:

  $powercfg -lastwake
  
  Wake History Count - 1
  Wake History [0]
    Wake Source Count - 0
  

• Also following the above link, the event viewer showed the cause of the wake-up was "unknown". I didn't follow the rest of the webpage because it proceeds to prevent input devices from waking the computer. My concern is that the button appears to be a key on the keyboard, so if I disable the keyboard's ability to wake the computer, I'll never be able to wake the computer. My only hope is if the power button isn't really considered a keyboard key, despite the fact that it looks and feels exactly like one.

Answer 1

I had similar issues. Here is the link https://superuser.com/a/886728/422922

ou mentioned wireless devices in your bag. The laptop with the lid down can wake from sleep. After the time expires from no activity, the laptop goes to sleep. The length is determined by the power settings in the power control panel. This explains the battery drain, since the fan runs full speed to cool the CPU.

You could run cmd.exe as administrator to get around permission errors. But, this does not always work. A better solution is running psexec which makes you localservice. This does not have permission issues removing devices that wake from sleep.

Here is the link https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896649.aspx or http://download.sysinternals.com/files/PSTools.zip to psexec, part of the Microsoft sysinternals.

Use

psexec -i -d -s cmd.exe to gain access to localservice. From there run:

powercfg.exe /DEVICEQUERY wake_armed It shows a list of devices that can wake the laptop from sleep. I did this on all my laptops. Each one had different devices that could wake it from sleep. Now, to be safe, I removed all of them so that nothing could wake it up. Remove as many as you like.

Run this command to remove a device:

powercfg.exe /DEVICEDISABLEWAKE "your device string goes here" Like

powercfg.exe /DEVICEDISABLEWAKE "HID-compliant mouse (001)" I ran this for each one and verified by running

powercfg.exe /DEVICEQUERY wake_armed again. This time I received None.

I have not had any of my laptops wake up since.

Answer 2

You can turn off waking up computer by keyboard in Device Manager. In the proper device properties you have Power Management where you can switch off the ability to wake up the computer.