Computer Starts Up On It's Own

[beachbuoy]

My Win7 64-bit PC, built on a Gigabyte P55A mainboard, starts up all by itself. Not every time I shut it off. But, maybe 30-40 percent of the time, I will shut it down for the night and, if I don't flip the power supply off, the computer will start up sometime during the night and be running when I walk into the office in the (home) office. Once, I caught it in action. I came back to the computer about 30 minutes after shutting down Windows and it started booting back up as I was walking into the room.

Possibly related, if I put the PC into Sleep mode, I will come back later to find a blank screen with only the cursor blinking in the upper left corner of the screen, apparently failing to "Resume." I say apparently, because the only way to get Windows back up is to kill the power and reboot. Upon rebooting, it stops at the boot option screen asking if I want to wipe the resume info and start fresh or not. If I don't wipe and start fresh, it goes back to the blinking cursor and a blank screen.

I don't even know where to start in looking for an answer to this puzzle. Any ideas? :huh:

 

[bigmck]

My Win7 64-bit PC, built on a Gigabyte P55A mainboard, starts up all by itself. Not every time I shut it off. But, maybe 30-40 percent of the time, I will shut it down for the night and, if I don't flip the power supply off, the computer will start up sometime during the night and be running when I walk into the office in the (home) office. Once, I caught it in action. I came back to the computer about 30 minutes after shutting down Windows and it started booting back up as I was walking into the room.

Possibly related, if I put the PC into Sleep mode, I will come back later to find a blank screen with only the cursor blinking in the upper left corner of the screen, apparently failing to "Resume." I say apparently, because the only way to get Windows back up is to kill the power and reboot. Upon rebooting, it stops at the boot option screen asking if I want to wipe the resume info and start fresh or not. If I don't wipe and start fresh, it goes back to the blinking cursor and a blank screen.

I don't even know where to start in looking for an answer to this puzzle. Any ideas? :huh:

This indeed is rather strange. The most logical thing would be that your house is haunted , no just kidding. == I googled "windows 7 pc starts unexpectedly" and surprisingly there are a lot of links. One of them should be your problem. Sorry I did not have anything more specific.

 

[whs]

If the PC is in sleep mode, it can restart from an external interrupt it is getting - unless you have ruled that out with your settings.

If the power is off, it should not be able to restart.

 

[DavidE]

In BIOS settings check if you have Wake On LAN (WOL) enabled.
If you do, disable it, and see if that helps.

 

[beachbuoy]

Thank you for the suggestions, guys. Wake on LAN was not enabled, but, there were a surprising number of other wake-up options, including some that could possibley be triggered by a misbehaving power supply. So, I disable those and will see how things go from here.

Who's awesome? YOU ARE, SevenForums.com!

 

[rvcjew]

If you get it again after it starts up go to an admin command prompt and put "powercfg lastwake". It will tell you what did it if it can tell.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/122012-lastwake-command.html