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.