My laptop is an insomniac

I have a new laptop from PCSpecialist. It keeps waking up for no reason that I can fathom, when it's meant to be asleep.

This happens whether I just close the lid, or even if I manually use the Start > Power setting to put it in Sleep mode.

The behaviour is that it goes to sleep for maybe a minute, or sometimes even for hours, but (usually sooner rather than later) it wakes itself up again.

I got into the habit of switching my wireless mouse off in case it was waking up on account of a mouse cursor movement, but even with the mouse off the behaviour persists.

This happens too much for it to be some sort of scheduled task or update (and I haven't installed or set anything that should be doing that). There is no obvious program running when I open the laptop to look at what it's decided to wake itself up for, nothing unusual in Task Manager etc. It just seems to decide to randomly wake itself!

Any ideas...?


This is machine is just a few weeks old. Some details:

Chassis & Display Optimus Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD IPS LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™ i7 Quad Core Processor 6700HQ (2.6GHz, 3.5GHz Turbo)
Memory (RAM) 16GB Kingston SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 960M - 2.0GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12
2nd Graphics Card NONE
Memory - Hard Disk 1TB SEAGATE HYBRID 2.5" SSHD Drive, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (5400 rpm)

You can find out what device woke your computer by opening an elevated command prompt and entering the command "powercfg -lastwake" (without the quotes). You can also find out which devices are able to wake the computer by entering the command "powercfg -devicequery wake_armed" (without the quotes). If there is a device in that list that you don't want to wake the computer open Devoice Manager, right-click on the device and select Properties and on the Power Management tab uncheck 'Allow this device to wake the computer'.

It may be that a timer is popping and waking the computer, you can find out what wake timers are enabled by entering the command "powercfg -waketimers" (without the quotes). You can also disable all program wake timers by going in to the Power Options, expand the Sleep section and then expand the Allow wake timers section. Set those values to Disabled.

I have delayed to come back to thsi because I had to return the laptop to PC Specialist twice with a sound fault.

Now I have it back and last night the battery apparently drained to nothing while it was sat on a table with the lid shut! Here's the relevant PowerCfg report:

21:38:56 Active AC 100 % 61,161 mWh
23:16:01 Active Battery 100 % 61,161 mWh < plugged in while being used last night
2016-11-16 04:14:37 Suspended 5 % 3,308 mWh < overnight drain of battery for unknown reason!
15:55:34 Active AC 2 % 1,388 mWh < me switching it on again just now
16:06:59 Report generated AC 13 % 7,537 mWh

Powercfg /lastwake just returns:

Wake History Count - 1
Wake History [0]

I assume this is because it's been woken from cold having running itself down. (It would not switch on just now until I plugged the AC in.)

There are no active waketimers. The /Reqeusts command is similarly useless.

I'm at a loss. There was nothing on the system - no media players open for example - that I can think would do this. It's actually happened more than once this week. Other than Chrome, Adobe Creative Suite, and Steam (plus it's various games), I can't really think of anything I've installed, certainly nothing that should be demanding the machine wake up with the lid shut (or possibly just stay awake when I shut the lid) and drain the battery all night.

Any more ideas anyone?

How are you shutting the computer down? Are you just hitting the power button? It would appear that your PC is going into sleep mode of sorts and draining. According to the above information it wasn't shut down?

The_Scotster said:

How are you shutting the computer down? Are you just hitting the power button? It would appear that your PC is going into sleep mode of sorts and draining. According to the above information it wasn't shut down?

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I read his first post as though he is sleeping the laptop not shutting it down. Something is waking it from sleep I think.

If it's not a device waking it then it must be software. I would try closing each application you leave running one at at time to see whether you can determine whether one of them is waking it from sleep.

I do tend to agree with The_Scotster though that shutting it down would make more sense. The boot time these days is pretty fast.

That's right it is waking from sleep.

It happened again tonight - when I came home after four hours or so away, the machine was switched off again but was actually *hot*. So it had woken itself, and been awake long enough to get hot and drain the battery to such an extent that I think it had then gone into hibernation (because it was on battery).

I'm really worried about my not-cheap and quite new PCS machine overheating itself randomly like this when it's meant ot be asleep on battery. If I carry it in a bag it could do this in a confined space, for example and overheat - or more normally it could just drain the battery prior to me needing to use the battery! Obviously I could shut it down every time I'm away from it but that's a hassle and it's not that fast to start up actually. :-(

There are several suggestions that come up again and again online when searching for this problem. I've tried them all:

I have tried looking into Scheduled Tasks which can have options to wake the computer from sleep, but found no scheduled task that said it was doing that.
I tried looking into Wake Timers through Powercfg but that tells me I have no wake timers existing.
I have tried looking at the options of software I tend to have open like Chrome, Google Drive Sync, Media Player etc - anything I could think of that might conceivably wake the machine. Nothing.
And I have looked at the Security and Maintenance settings where you can tell it not to wake the machine from sleep to do schedule maintenance.

I have just now tried Scotser's suggestion on this other thread https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/foru...series-laptop)&p=377368&viewfull=1#post377368 to switch off my network adapters' ability to wake the computer if it gets a "magic packet". That's not a tip I'd seen elsewhere. So I guess it's wait 'n' see time again!

...it's not that fast to start up actually. :-(

Click to expand...

That might be a clue. Even with that (less than ideal) 5400rpm SSHD drive startup shouldn't be so long that you feel that it's slow, especially if you'e running Windows 10. That's making me wonder whether you might have either a malware infection of some sort (and that's what's waking it) or a problem with Windows or other installed software (that also wakes it)?

First off I'd run a couple of good malware scanners over it - one of them should be Malwarebyte's scanner. If they find nothing significant I'd be tempted to take a disk image of your current system (so that you have an easy way back) and then do a completely clean reinstall of Windows, all drivers (let Windows Update install those for Windows 10) and all the latest updates. At that point I'd put it to sleep and see whether it will wake itself. I suspect it won't because my gut tells me that something software related is waking it (and that could be malware).