Event Viewer help? Need to diagnose unexpected shutdown on new build

Well, I think I’ve figured it out, thanks to all and especially GEWB.

Here’s what seems to have happened:

I never use sleep for anything but a monitor. When my monitor goes to sleep, I wag the mouse at it and it comes to life.

I habitually set the monitor to sleep at 30 minutes rather than the default 10 minutes. So I do look at that control when I install. Apparently, this time I didn’t pay enough attention to the PC setting and left it at the default 30 minutes rather than my usual “never”.

So—the PC goes to sleep at 30 minutes. I wake up and think it’s outright off and having a problem, not asleep. It has no LEDs. I confirm that to myself (erroneously) by wagging the mouse and seeing that the monitor doesn’t wake up. Nothing happens.

Since I never use PC sleep, I was unaware that the default to awaken this PC from sleep is keyboard activity, not mouse. I didn’t even try the keyboard.

Is keyboard activity required to awaken a PC standard across all of them or does it depend on the BIOS maker? Mine is AMI.

Does anyone know exactly what level of activity will prevent a sleeping state, other than keyboard or mouse activity? Any running job?

GEWB: the backup app is “Synchredible”, free from Ascomp.de. German, but English interface. Superb interface and recommended to anyone.

David: I was using the version Brink linked to in the tutorial you linked in post 2. Turns out it’s 3 years old. I’ve since gone to the Passmark site, Memtest86.com, and got the most current version. I ran 3 passes last night and got no errors. I’ll probably run more passes in the next few days. It does correctly ID the RAM.

Speccy’s report is incomplete. I have the late April version of it and it says “unknown” for type, but the rest of the RAM specs are correct.

Haven’t looked at CPU-Z yet, but probably will, particularly if I try an overclock.

That’s it. Thanks again for the help. Every time I build one of these things, I run into things I’ve never seen before. This UEFI thing with hundreds of settings is going to take some time.

Look and see if you have Wake on LAN. or WAN.

Did you see anything in Even Viewer with anything in the time range of your problem?

ignatzatsonic said:

Does anyone know exactly what level of activity will prevent a sleeping state, other than keyboard or mouse activity? Any running job?

In my experience, there is no level of activity that will prevent the PC from going to sleep, except for media streaming, and you have to set the PC to stay awake during media streaming in the Power Options settings.

That's always been a gripe with Windows for me. Doing a long virus scan can often put my PC to sleep. I've had to resort to setting it to never fall asleep just to preserve my sanity. Microsoft should have really thought more about this when they made Windows, IMHO.

DavidE said:

In my experience programs can prevent auto sleep.
I'm guessing it depends on the program.

I would defer to your experience as being correct more than my own, but all I can say is that if I don't set my PC to never sleep, it falls asleep like it's been taking barbiturates. :)