Wednesday 9 September 2009

Windows Waking From Sleep Issues

As I use my Windows PC mostly as a media centre, it is constantly waking itself up and going back to sleep again. While this is often necessary for tasks such as recording television programs, sometimes the wake times just don't make sense.

To find out what is causing your computer to wake you can use this command from a command prompt: "powercfg -lastwake" without the quotes. This will give you a simple explanation of what caused the computer to wake. Most of the time this will be due to a scheduled recording but can be due to a guide update, virus scan etc.

Once you have determined a wake cause that you don't think is necessary eg. a virus scanner waking your computer up to scan while you are trying to get to sleep, you can either look into that specific application and try to disable the wake or look into the Windows Task scheduler, possibly disabling some tasks from waking the computer if it is asleep.


To do this right click on your "My Computer" icon and click "Manage", you will need administrator privileges to make changes in here. From the left hand side expand System Tools->Task Scheduler->Task Scheduler Library->Microsoft->Windows to get a list of applications with scheduled tasks. Click on an application or service eg. Media Center to get a list of tasks at the top. Have a look in the triggers column to see if any tasks have scheduled times to run.

Click on a task then click "Properties" from the right hand panel to view more information and edit it if necessarry. If the task does not have to run at a specific time eg. guide update or virus scan you can either change the time, decide whether the task can wake the computer or simply wait until it is next on.

Be very careful when making changes here as certain tasks need to run to keep your system stable. Only change things that you are sure about!

No comments: