Windows Media Center Updates - Enable or Disable Waking Computer

Not at that pc now (at work), but I had an entry that was just "mcupdate" and another that was "mcupdate_scheduled". Not sure now if "_scheduled" was within a "mcupdate" folder, but it looked like two separate entries to me.

Hi Brink and bg17,

Yes, this was the problem: mcupdate_scheduled. I have now unticked the wake if asleep box - so hopefully problem solved!!

Thank you both for your help

...but the check boxes are grayed out. The box labeled "wake the computer to run this task" is indeed checked, but I cannot uncheck it! I am logged in as a user with administrative privileges on Windows 7 Home edition. Anyone else having this problem?

Never mind, I figured it out. Double click mcupdate_shceduled and then select the Conditions tab. The boxes are checkable and uncheckable.

Hi Brink,

U R the Man (Alien?) - mcupdate_scheduled was waking my PC.

Thanks again for yet another assist

Nearly 6 years after this was first posted, it is still very useful. That is one thing among many I really like about Brink's tutorials. Short and to the point, not a lot of excess.

In my case, my wife's computer had been driving me crazy by waking periodically from sleep, for no apparent reason. Recently upgraded to Win 10--but I think this has actually been going on much longer. Following suggestion in another tutorial, I looked at the Event Viewer and filtered the Windows System log for "Power troubleshooter" and it was only then that I realized that all the wake events that were intentional had "USB Root Hub" as the wake source. That's because these were mouse movements or key presses--on these devices (but the device was recorded here as the USB hub rather than the actual device.)

However, the ones that were not intentional all said "unknown". The mystery deepened further when I saw that these were all at 10:02:30 PM, which seemed like a clue--but not every night,...which was not noticed by me at first because the computer was often awake at that time. Also, at first I did not know how to track down the source.

One problem with Windows is that there are so many places one has to check or things to try to get to an answer. Could Microsoft have made it any harder to figure out the cause of some issues? Finally when I tried "powercfg -waketimers" with the Command Prompt, I was led towards the answer: "Reason: Windows will execute 'NT TASK\Microsoft\Windows\Media Center\mcupdate_scheduled' scheduled task that requested waking the computer."

Eureka! Is this actually Windows Media Center--the program that I understood was supposed to be uninstalled by a Windows 10 upgrade, that was waking up the computer? But wait,...one might miss that Windows Media Center is not on the system--Windows Media Player is. Isn't that the same program??? At last--that should be simple. I opened Windows Media Player and looked for a place to deselect when to do updates. No dice. Should have been simple, but I could not find this choice anywhere in the program options.

Okay, I was finally led to check the Task Scheduler (not obvious to most users),...but even then it wasn't easy. First I had looked at the Update Orchestrator, based on a GHacks post, but my issue wasn't there;...in fact, there is an item, also under Task Scheduler Library/Microsoft/Windows, called Media Center (a program which no longer exists in Windows 10). Then you have to find both "mcupdate" and "mcupdate_scheduled", and even after that the boxes that show "Wake the computer to run this task" are grayed out. Many thanks to perkinw above for the seemingly minor but completely significant clue that you need to DOUBLE-CLICK the item to find a new window with boxes you can actually check or uncheck!!!

This is all what has become par for the course in making Windows work properly. What about the poor user? ...Will the day ever return when we can spend more time actually using a computer than figuring out how to deal with all the issues that arise, and how to make the computer operate the way we want?

Michael