What can wake my laptop out of sleep mode ?

Obviously the keyboard keypress and/or mouse click can wake it up, but what other things? Mouse movement definitely doesn't wake it up.

I prefer to make it sleep rather than hibernate (hibernation is disabled, to save having a 32GB file saved each time). After choosing Win 7 Start menu then "Sleep", it will happily go into sleep mode. But then sometimes (not all the time), after finally getting to sleep and the fans go off and the illuminated keyboard goes off, it'll wait a second and then wake straight back up and show the windows fast login menu. I have to hold the power button for a second to put it back to sleep. Then it's 50/50 whether it'll wake itself up again. Sometimes I have go through this procedure 3 times to make it go to sleep. On other occasions it'll work first time.

I tried disabling the LAN adaptor's "wake on LAN" but that didn't make any difference.

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
Quite a few things can wake a computer
When does it wake 2-3a.m. ?

I'm looking for a list of those "quite a few things".

It wakes as soon as I put it to sleep, about 50% of the time when I'm putting it to sleep.

I click Start->Sleep (not hibernate) and after a couple of seconds the keyboard illumination turns off, the fan turns off, the screen goes black, the mouse goes dark and it's asleep. Then within a second (50% of the time) it'll wake straight back up and go to the login page. That's without me touching the keyboard, clicking the mouse, and wake-on-lan is turned off so it's not that. Sometimes it take me 3 or 4 attempts to make it sleep. Once it has gone to sleep for more than 2 seconds though, it never wakes up until I press a key on the keyboard or click a button on the mouse.

What model laptop? Is there anything at all that is plugged-in to it? I have a USB modem for mine that won't let my laptop sleep, just as yours. Comes back on after 30 seconds or so such that I simply have to leave it unplugged, because no driver that I tried would make it work properly.

After waking, get a cmd.exe prompt and type powercfg -lastwake to see if that offers any clues.

Power Options are sorta nightmarish (to try to change each/every one) but have you e.g. disabled "USB selective suspend".

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
See if disabling wake timers helps
Control panel/ Power options/ Change when the computer sleeps on the top left.
Scroll the list for Sleep and expand the drop down list for Wake timers = disabled.

Do you have a wireless mouse and key board ?

Thanks for those suggestions. Wake timers are disabled, and no wireless mouse and keyboard

Well, after a bit of googling I found how to query what devices can wake up my machine and saw it's currently only the keyboard(s) and mice.



So I disabled them one by one and now should have nothing that can wake it up (except hopefully still the power button).



It'll probably be a day or two before I really know if it worked. If it does, I might try re-enabling just one of them and see if I can get away with that or if I need to use the power button all the time.

maxseven said:

What model laptop? Is there anything at all that is plugged-in to it? I have a USB modem for mine that won't let my laptop sleep, just as yours. Comes back on after 30 seconds or so such that I simply have to leave it unplugged, because no driver that I tried would make it work properly.

After waking, get a cmd.exe prompt and type powercfg -lastwake to see if that offers any clues.

Power Options are sorta nightmarish (to try to change each/every one) but have you e.g. disabled "USB selective suspend".

Oh, I missed this post completely. Looks like we posted at the same time. Yeah, the last wake was useless. Even when I did a wake-up from a known source (tried once by pressing a key on the keyboard ... "unknown source" and tried once clicking the mouse ... "unknown source"). I doubt it would be more informative when it gets woken up by the real unknown source. Anyway, I've disabled all the wakeable devices so that'll be interesting to see if it helps.

I suppose "wake by power button" would not be the worst thing. Is this something that only started recently? Dunno why "unknown source" from lastwake command but pursuing that might be an order-of-magnitude more complicated to t-shoot!

So, that powercfg cmd window was the key really. It allowed me to enquire what devices were capable of waking the machine. I could then go into controlpanel -> device manager and go into the properties and turn off "allow this device to wake computer" on them all. That proved to be the key. Over the next day or two I never got any re-awaken situations. Now I've re-enabled wakeability only for my external mouse to see if I can have that but nothing else, and so far so good.

Perhaps it was some kind of clash between having an internal mousepad and an external mouse, or an internal keyboard and an external one too.