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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

My Windows PC randomly wakes from sleep because the mouse moves like 1/2000 DPI in some direction because of air movements or some heavy truck driving by nearby my house.

Razer mouse, in case it matters.

I think Microsoft could save a whole lot of energy usage globally by pushing a more sensible algorithm with an update.

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In case anyone else has this issue, at least it’s pretty easy to turn off:

Launch Device Manager.

Go to Mice and other pointing devices.

If you’re using a Bluetooth mouse, go to Human Interface Devices.

Right-click on your mouse and select Properties.

Select the Power Management tab.

Find the option: Allow this device to wake the computer. Uncheck it.

(Thanks, I just did that. It worked.)

This demonstrates that it's in Microsoft's power to save a whole lot of electric power usage globally by pushing a software update.

Sure, but those kinds of updates are usually the kind that hackernews complains about. "Microsoft pushes mandatory, OPT-OUT windows update that prevents mouse from waking up computer!"

Then later, in typical internet fashion.

"alt right angered as Trump slams Bidens mouse moving policy claiming freedom of mouse movement is more important than saving our planet from imminent assured death due to global warming"

ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/

I have never seen this happening, with many machines and different mice. Maybe it only happens with specific mice? Anyway, want I want to say is that the power usage across the world due to this misfeature is maybe not quite as dramatic as it may appear.

I's a high-DPI "gaming" mouse. I use it because it has lots of programmable buttons.

Gaming seems like quite a big thing with Windows users these days though and they seem to want high-DPI mice, so I do think it could actually be a sizeable thing outside of large office environments.

did it work for Bluetooth mouse? I thought that wakeup from sleep works only for wired mice

Or just flip the mouse over when you walk away.

That could work if you only care about your own electricity usage. How are you going to get the other several billions of Windows users to do the same? Maybe a software update makes more sense?

I do believe there was a game which had an easter egg based on this. While the game controls were keyboard-based, it detected the erratic mouse moves to display something like "Don't whack your table!".

Now I wonder if mouse movement could be used as a side channel to hear sounds in a room... NSA have probably done it already.

Or Mordechai Guri, the Israeli dude who specializes in air gap exploits.

The problem with that solution is most people want their PC to wake up when they wiggle the mouse.

There's a big difference between "wiggling the mouse", and having a non-zero reading from the mouse. With sufficient sensitivity, a breeze or vibration can cause the latter, but a wake-algorithm should be able to distinguish the two.

Makes me wonder if there’s a huge power surge during late night earthquakes due to moving mice…

It turns out it's actually pretty easy to distinguish "wiggle the mouse" from "a truck just drove by nearby and triggered a one pixel movement". Microsoft should have quite a few employees that could figure this out.

It is probably hard to do while the computer is asleep.

As I wrote in another comment; it was possible to disable wake from sleep from within Windows for that particular mouse; that was promising.

I don't know if it's possible to execute logic on mouse movements in the Windows sleep power state. Either way, I feel it's something MSFT should spend some time on, given the current situation.

If there is code running in that low power state, it's likely firmware on a microcontroller somewhere inside the motherboard chipset. Microsoft probably can't do anything to fix that, other than make more robust mouse wakeup a requirement for branding future products as "made for windows".

Suspend isn't even usable at all on my desktop when running Linux. The AMD GPU doesn't come back up properly 3 out of 4 times, and then any userspace processes that were using any graphics APIs (such as the desktop environment) are borked. Fixing that would probably save me 1kWh per day.

In my experience, I can't even get monitors to power off reliably, and I spend hours and hours fiddling with that sort of thing trying to debug it. Anything power-save related is a mess.

If that's the case, at least they could make change the default of allowing wake-by-mouse-movement via a software update, as demonstrated by my experiment just now.

They could, but a lot of folks (anecdotally) do want their computer to wake on mouse movement. Maybe it could be tied to power management mode as a compromise.

I remember a computer I had 15 years ago waking up on mouse movement, and it was great. My last couple desktops /might/ wake up on a mouse click, if they go into suspend at all on Linux. I assume the general regression in suspend in Linux is due to Windows mandating non-standards based power saving modes in the last decade.

listening for clicking might be a better choice:

1. mouse doesn't have 'actively listen' for mouse movement - exceptions: ball-mouse 2. unintentional-clicking is much more rare

he didnt' say it shouldn't wake when it wiggles, he said they change the sensitivity required to wake it.

I wish the mouse itself could filter out these movements and refuse to send a wake signal unless the magnitude exceeded a minimum threshold.

I think this is exactly what my Logitech M510 does. When the mouse goes to “sleep” after being idle for some time, bumping it very slightly doesn’t seem to do anything; you have to move it about a quarter inch or more for it to wake up. This effectively prevents minor bumps from waking up my PC.

Apple too. I have a USB mouse and it's virtually impossible to put my Macbook Pro to sleep. I've resorted to unplugging its power supply (when the lid's closed it won't wake up if it's not plugged in). But you would have thought this was trivial to fix.

Apple solved this by having the mouse charge port on the bottom. So if the mouse is changing it’s unlikely to trigger as its upside down.

However if a fly goes past.

This comment makes no sense.

However if a fly goes past.

I believe it should be: "However, if a fly goes past, it can get in the way of the laser (or whatever the mouse uses) and trigger mouse movement."

Okay. Now please explain "Apple solved this by having the mouse charge port on the bottom."

The mouse won’t randomly move on the table and trigger the sensor, because Apple’s horrible mouse has to be charged upside down, looking like a dead beetle. I hate that mouse.

I should have put an ellipsis at the end of my fly comment.

So every time you're away from the desk, you put Apple's horrible mouse upside down to charge it and thus this problem is solved?

Yeah, I know I'm probably being overly anal here, but, come on. :)

This is how you charge it. It really is horrible. I love my Mac’s but not this mouse.

That sounds like a mouse issue, there shouldn't be enough jitter for that to happen. Common reasons would be a dirty sensor or maybe surface incompatibility.

If it's wireless flip the switch underneath the mouse to power it off.

That doesn't scale. You need to make it frictionless to the end user.

(And I'm using a wired mouse since I hate changing batteries.)

Pardon my confusion but…

…what? Is there a laugh being had that’s going over my head? I’m still kinda waking up

Most people are lazy. A software solution is going to be more effective than a wetware one.

And those that aren't lazy will not automatically learn about what they "should do".

Nevermind that it's just stupid to tell people what to manually do when it's possible to automate it via software.

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