Why does my pc turn itself on?

[andrew129260]

Turns on, does this mean the pc is fully off and then turns on? Or is the system in standby? Have you done what I suggested in my post above you?

 

[MacGyverDB]

Cold PC

The laptop is totally cold. On it's own it starts up at 3 AM.
I have done 2 Factory Restore/Resets to the drive that was in it. The second time I had it intentionally not turn on Automatic Updates.

I have also since my posting used a different hard drive and did a factory restore to it. It still does it at exactly 3 AM.

Something is in the BIOS telling it to do this. However there is no way to see anything telling it to do this.
The BIOS is pretty plain vanilla generic.

I am now attempting to put Ubuntu on the 2nd drive while it's still in it and see if it does it when it's a totally different OS.

 

[MacGyverDB]

Yes I had already found those timers and disabled them. Made no difference.

 

[MacGyverDB]

Ok this is going to sound long but it's what I did and thus far every attempt to repeat the 3 AM auto start has shown that it did something.

I left the hard drive in it, and used Ubuntu to totally wipe the system. It did not restart with Ubuntu at 3 AM.
I had nothing to lose so I went back to the Recovery Disks that I had been using. The menu that came up was no where near as long as it had been in prior attempts. Only one option. Factory Restore. So I did it.

Now any attempt to set the clock to 2:58 AM and watch it is met with it staying shut off at 3 AM.
Something was coming from Windows 7 to my BIOS to tell it to turn on at 3 AM. Even after the prior Factory Restores.
Something that Ubuntu did to the whole drive must have finally erased it all. 3 hours later I have completed all the Windows Updates and it still stays off at 3 AM. Whatever caused this I have no idea, whatever stopped it, I have also no idea.

 

[andrew129260]

Ya the wake timers would have no effect as its a software thing, not a hardware level thing. If your pc was in standby and waking up, that would help.

But this is something entirely different. Perhaps your bios is just wonky. Have you tried calling the MFTR? And you have done a complete bios factory reset settings as well?

The issue here is not software related, but hardware. Well, low level software related.-bios.

That is very odd. Was this machine ever part of a corporate network/school/domain?

Glad you got it resolved though.

 

[MacGyverDB]

Nope, the only other networks's this thing has been on has been at hotels. I'm at a loss as to how ingrained this was myself. After putting in the other hard drive I concluded it was within the BIOS somehow. Resetting it did no good, it was the weirdest thing that Ubuntu seems to have cured it. Here we are at almost noon EST and the thing is still off.

I wonder if somehow Ubuntu has similar options to cause a PC to wake up to perform tasks, and when I installed it it cleared that segment of the BIOS. That's my only guess at this point. I can't write to the BIOS with what I have, outside of the BIOS update that I did thru Windows earlier last week. I'm sure there are programs that you can use to do that but I don't have them.

If this goes through this evening staying off then I'm sure I'm well on the way to making my Wife a bit happier lol...it's her laptop.

I shut off Stand-By options and Hibernation options. I don't like to use them. Those are usually among the first things I reconfigure when I get an OS going.

 

[MacGyverDB]

I did some digging...yes Ubuntu does have the same ability as Windows 7 to tell the hardware to turn on at a specific time from being completely off. In all likelyhood when I loaded Ubuntu to that drive, it wiped out whatever was still in there from Windows 7. When I reinstalled Windows 7, it had nothing in there because I have not allowed external timers and now should stay in good shape. Will know in a few more hours. It's been off (thankfully) since 8 last night. Will see if it gets to the 24 hour mark soon. Would be nice if someone would develop a fix that you could run to blank whatever Windows uses to set the BIOS to turn on rather than what I had to go through...if in deed this was the true issue.