-1

I wrote a program that outputs the amount of time my Windows 10 laptop's input is idle (e.g. GetLastInputInfo()). It does so every 1 second. If I do not touch the keyboard or mouse, the idle time will climb. Every 24 seconds, the idle time will reset back to zero. I suspect that some process is sending input. How do I figure out which process is sending input?

This prevents my laptop from going to sleep and hibernate.

  • Autoruns does not show any new processes under the Logon tab.
  • All categories of powercfg /requests show none
  • The network cards are allowed to turn off
  • powercfg /energy does not show anything useful
  • powercfg /lastwake is from days ago
  • WinSleep shows that the user idle time is being reset
  • Two different keyloggers did not show any keystrokes when the idle input time is reset
  • I wrote a key and mouse logger. It shows key and mouse events when I type or move the mouse but does not show any events when the idle input time is reset
Nathan
  • 1,385
  • 5
  • 19
  • 36

1 Answers1

1

I have a wireless mouse and wireless keyboard from Logitech. Logitech has a receiver that plugs into a USB port. If I remove the receiver, then the idle time is not reset. If I insert the receiver and turn off the mouse and keyboard, then the idle time is reset. I thought the Logitech receiver is going bad. I bought a new receiver. It did not solve the problem.

I then disabled half of the running Windows Services. This fixed the problem. I then reenabled half of those services. The problem did not come back. I kept reenabling or disabling half of the remaining services and eventually figured out that the service called Alienware Command Center Service is causing the problem.

In Windows Task Scheduler, I created a task to run every day at 5:30 am and when the laptop goes idle. The task executes the following commands:

  1. sc config AWCCService start=disabled
  2. sc stop AWCCService

These commands disable Alienware Command Center Service from starting and stop it if it is currently running.

Recently, I upgraded some Alienware software. This reenabled the service. The above task disabled the service. I have not had a problem since.

Nathan
  • 1,385
  • 5
  • 19
  • 36