Vista Insomnia
I have a fairly decent old system that I am repurposing to use as a main floor computer, something that will be used occasionally for playing a video for my son or maybe playing music. The computer I’m using used to be my Media Center, and so never needed to go to sleep. But in it’s new role, I expect it to spend most of it’s time asleep.
Vista, however, disagrees. I tell it to sleep, it goes all the way to sleep (including clicking off the power supply and fans), and then immediately wakes up.
Vista has some tools to help diagnose this sort of problem. The main one is the powercfg utility, described in this blog post by Brad Rutkowski:
POWERCFG has the answer to that question and many others, like -LASTWAKE will tell you why your machine resumed from sleep or hibernate.
For me, all this said was that “USB Root Hub” was waking up the system and I don’t even have an external hub (it’s the motherboard chipset that it’s referring to). That’s not right, so I asked it what devices were armed to wake up the computer (using “powercfg -devicequery wake_armed” as described here). That told me that my keyboard and my mouse were the only devices armed for wakeup.
Okay – so you can use the Device Manager in the Control Panel to set whether or not a device capable of waking the system is allowed to do so, by going into it’s properties. It’s not uncommon for a mouse to send spurious movements and wake the system up so I took away it’s ability to wake the system and tested it by putting the system to sleep.
And it immediately woke up. Okay, so it must be the keyboard. I switched it so the mouse was armed for wakeup and the keyboard was not. Still no sleep.
I set it so neither of those two devices was armed for wakeup, and the system stayed asleep. Somehow, both my mouse and keyboard were immediately waking the system.
I tried a different keyboard, and a different mouse. No change. I have no idea why this system thinks the keyboard and mouse are both waking it up as soon as it goes to sleep.
Anyone else had this problem? I’ve seen quite a few people post about the mouse waking the system up, but I haven’t seen anyone else with an immediate wakeup from both the keyboard and mouse.
(I do have ACPI 2.0 turned on in the BIOS, and set the other BIOS power related settings to things that seem to make sense.. but I’m not ruling that out as a problem).
July 8th, 2008 at 5:59 am
I tried a few things to ensure it wasn’t real input from the mouse .. the first mouse I tried it with was a ball mouse, so it wouldn’t have quite the same sensitivity, and it happened there every time as well.
One explanation I found that seems plausible is when Vista goes to sleep, one of the things it does is shut off the power to the devices (keyboard, mouse), and that the hub then sees a device disconnected and wakes the system up. There’s a knowledge base article (841858) that describes how to mitigate this in XP, but the same technique apparently doesn’t work for Vista.
I’d leave the mouse or keyboard awake, but the option to do so is greyed out.