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Comment by kblev | Hacker News Reader

Windows keeps waking up for random things, the problem is getting worse with every Windows release and Microsoft keeps removing more and more controls.

Just a few days ago I spent hours trying to fix the constant wake-ups. This time it was a waketimer set by the StartMenuExperienceHost.exe process! [1]

Microsoft already removed the Power Management tabs in Device Manager for most devices (mouse, etc.). They also removed the "Allow wake timers" option in Power Options (Surface pro has very limited power options exposed). They also removed the CSEnabled registry key.

[1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/all/how-to...

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> Windows keeps waking up for random things, the problem is getting worse with every Windows release

I resorted to removing the power plug from the PC every evening after it kept turning itself on during the night semi-randomly. It was in "suspend to disk" mode, whatever that is in more technical power-save jargon terms, not just "suspend-to-ram".

I spent a significant amount of time going through Windows event logs to find what caused the wake-ups, fixed some, others were too broad to do anything about it. The settings are useless. So is the Microsoft help forum. I won't even try to ask Dell (Dell 8500 PC), they are only good at sending replacement hardware but unable to answer anything related to software (as long as they do the former I came to accept the latter).

I too had my (also Dell) laptop overheat after I had suspended it, thinking it was turned off. It was very hot when I took it out of the bag later, fortunately it was just in time. It seems this mishap caught a lot of people off guard.

What REALLY pisses me off is that if I put my computer to sleep for the night, and windows then runs some updates, it doesn't put the computer back to sleep! Why not? Why should it run all night instead of going back to sleep, what the hell microsoft

> I resorted to removing the power plug from the PC every evening after it kept turning itself on during the night semi-randomly. It was in "suspend to disk" mode, whatever that is in more technical power-save jargon terms, not just "suspend-to-ram".

In "Suspend to RAM", the RAM is kept powered when the computer is shut down, and thus doesn't have to be touched on wake, but it means the computer has to stay powered the whole time.

In "Suspend to disk", the entire RAM is written to disk (which can take some time especially with an HDD) then the computer shuts down entirely, on wake the OS will restore RAM from disk before resuming. The need to read data back from disk to RAM makes the wake costlier, but because everything's on disk the computer can be completely shutdown.

The two can be combined into mode where data is written to disk (making going to sleep slower) then the computer enters "suspend to RAM" mode. If the computer is resumed normally it is restored from RAM, but if the computers suffers power loss it's restored from disk. Either way the computer doesn't have to boot from scratch and all the working set should be recovered. IIRC it's the default behaviour for macOS laptops, microsoft calls it "hybrid sleep".

Before you put it sleep activate Airplane mode. Hopefully it will disable wake ups.

I've seen the same behavior on a 10+y.o. system with Win11 on it. I started unplugging it every night and re-plugging it every day when I went to use it.

Funny thing has happened in the meantime, since getting a MB Air I haven't plugged it in for like 2 months now...

> Windows keeps waking up for random things

Mine will wake the screen and make "device connected" and "device disconnected" sounds while the computer isn't sleeping, regularly. Besides being annoying (I eventually disabled those specific sounds), it probably meaningfully hurts the lifespan of my monitors to power cycle them every five freakin' minutes.

I've never been able to figure out what exactly is happening here, trawling through event logs and such (I'm no Windows guru nor do I want to be).

At this point, in my particular case, Linux actually feels more "hardware compatible" than Windows. It can keep the monitors off.

I really wish Windows was good enough to not raise my blood with things like this, because sometimes you just need to use it.

powercfg /lastwake will tell you why the machine woke up.

Honestly I'm not sure where else you can find that information.

Generally it doesn't actually tell you why.

lastwake will be blank and the power report will just tell you it changed state but give no reason.

I found the same thing when I was trying to figure out why an Intel NUC7i5 keeps waking up for no reason.

One would hope that powercfg /lastwake provides some information, but it doesn't.

There is a big difference between how Window should work in theory and what happens in practice.

I noticed that it wakes from sleep for windows updates now, which not only is annoying (Bluetooth devices suddenly waking up too), but windows update often requires intense CPU usage as defender does its dirty things, .net re-JITs, etc.

This is a life-threating design. A high-end "gamer" laptop in a bag powering up unexpectedly could easily catch fire and kill someone.

These shenanigans will keep going on until someone dies and a manager or two at Microsoft is sent to jail for criminal negligence.

> These shenanigans will keep going on until someone dies

This will happen.

> and a manager or two at Microsoft is sent to jail for criminal negligence.

This will never happen.

What happened to overheating protection (and then hard shutdown from the BIOS)

Now imagine this happening in the overhead bin of a plane.

Or in the cargo hold.

In the US at least, laptops with LI-ion batteries are not supposed to be in the cargo hold.

I don't know whether the checked-luggage scanners catch this or what happens if they find a laptop in luggage.

The passenger isn't present during checked luggage scanning so it would be complicated to try to give the laptop to the passenger. The obvious alternatives look like theft and are extremely inconvenient. (Oh joy, I'm at my destination and my laptop isn't.)

Same in Europe. No idea what they do either. I've only put a laptop in my checked luggage once, in 2000 when it was still permitted. It was one with NiMH cells by the way which don't have a tendency to catch fire but they suck in other ways (energy density, memory effect). That's why nobody uses them anymore.

It arrived with a cracked screen so never again...

How can laptop catch fire? CPU throttles itself at 100 C and shuts down shortly thereafter. 100C is not enough to make a fire.

CPUs don't burn, but lithium ion cells don't like being at 100C.

My previous PC would wake up every night around 1am and I could never figure out why. I disabled every single wake timer, all kinds of wake permissions on devices, yet it would always wake up in the middle of the night. The power event in pc management only said "woken by: unknown source".

I do some support work for a friend and his kid's school laptops. All Lenovo/Win 10.

He complained about the same thing, in this case on laptops that were completely shutdown the night before. In the end we tracked it down to the Lenovo Vantage service.

I assume it was powering on the laptop to check for updates but I could find no log or record of it doing so. But, once we removed that software the issue went away completely.

Anecdotal I know and I even told him it could be something else, that removing the software may have changed something related but not from Lenovo, etc. But in the end, a few weeks later that is, he confirmed that since we did that, they did not have the problem again.

"unknown source", probably bill gates trolling you /s

Modem cycling DHCP IP ?

Mine used to do it at midnight and wake up my desktop till I gave it a static address

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