Vista Insomnia Cure
Last month I blogged about a problem I’d been having where my Vista machine kept waking up for no apparent reason. I think I’ve found out what was happening.
The computer in question was my old Windows Media Center box, now decomissioned. I deleted the user accounts and created new ones, but I didn’t wipe the box. Turns out that the Media Center had a number of daily shows scheduled to be recorded and whenever it was time to record a show, the computer would wake up.
I couldn’t find any way to “reset” Media Center, but after removing all the entries from the list of scheduled recordings, my computer stopped waking up.
So if you see Vista waking up unexpectedly, and “powercfg -lastwake” (as described here) reports what the Real-Time Clock (RTC) is responsible for waking up the computer, then check your Media Center scheduled recordings list.
June 6th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Hey Steve,
I just got a new system with Vista 64 Home Premium on it. For the first few times, it would remain asleep but then after uninstalling the junk programs that came with it and installing a few new things, it started behaving like your system was: going all the way to sleep just to wake-up again in a matter of seconds.
“powercfg -lastwake” didn’t tell me anything useful at all. I guess none of my devices support this new protocol.
So I tried “powercfg -devicequery wake_armed” to see what devices were permitted to wake my system from sleep and there were only two items: My keyboard and my LAN (I guess the “wake on LAN” option for the network connection was a factory default).
I have a DLink DNS-323 network enclosure which is “always on” so I thought I would try removing the “wake on LAN” setting for my system’s network connection to see if that would make a difference. If anything, I would think my system would attempt to keep the DNS-323 awake to maintain a connection but not the other way around. In any case, it worked!
No more “Vista Insomnia”.