Windows 7: Scheduler fails while trying to wake Windows from sleep/hibernation.

Hi there,

I am running a Windows 7 64-bit setup, and I'm trying to get a timer to wake Windows from sleep or hibernation.

I've got it to work flawlessly on my desktop, however on my laptop, a Dell D630, I can't seem to get it to work. I've created a task triggering on a specific time and running the operation '/c "exit"', which should just start a command prompt and close it again. I've set it to "run with highest privileges" and "wake the computer to run this task". However, it just doesn't boot as scheduled.



The history of the scheduler says nothing at the moment that the trigger is set to go off, but a minut later (probably when I manually boot) I get a "Task scheduler "{....}" instance of the task "\Wakeup" due to a time trigger condition."

What can I do to fix this?

Thank you.

Hello and welcome to Seven Forums.

Some things you can try for testing:

Turn off "run with highest privileges" - you shouldn't need it for this task

Try different setting combinations for:
"Run whether user is logged on or not" / "Run only when user is logged on"
"Start the task only if the computer is an AC power"
"Stop if the computer switches to battery power"

Compare each page in the Task settings between the Desktop and Laptop.
See if you can find some different setting(s) that might cause this.

If you logon with a Standard account when the computer sleeps, try using an Admin account.

Hope this helps,
David

I'm going to start with a different set of assumptions than David above me: if you have this working on a desktop, you obviously know what needs to be done on the laptop (ie, just copy all the settings that "work".)

The reality of the situation is that "wake on event" is not a function of the operating system, it's a function of the firmware on your computer. Windows is not running during sleep -- the only thing keeping tabs on your whole computer in an S3 or deeper state is the firmware. Thus, if the firmware doesn't have the proper support for wake-on-event, then Windows (or Linux or any other operating system) will be powerless to do anything about it.

Thus, your first target should be firmware updates and/or support emails to Dell. A brief Google suggests this device has problems coming out of S3 for other folks over a multitude of operating systems, so I cannot say that I'm surprised.

It occurs to me that you may have another option: some firmware models have a their own wake timer that you can set via the setup utility. I know it's sub-optimal, but would that be worth checking out? A bit of scripting can allow you to 'detect' that your box just woke up from a PME and then your code could fire at that point.

I built some code for trapping and then evaluating PME for making sure my machines go back to sleep after my WHS box wakes them up for backups. The boxes would all wake up without issue, but then would never go back to sleep. So my code fires, evaluates the PME type, checks to see if the backup process starts within 5 minutes of the PME, and if it does, will re-sleep the box five minutes after backup completes.