What's waking up my PC?

When I place my PC to sleep, it goes to sleep for 2 min and then wakes up again on its own.

I ran cmd.exe as an admin and then typed powercfg -last wake and -requests and I got nothing really that can direct me to figure this out. Any other suggestions? I've disabled many devices from waking the system up already including the keyboard (but not the mouse).

C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -lastwake
Wake History Count - 1
Wake History [0]
  Wake Source Count - 0

C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -requests
DISPLAY:
None.

SYSTEM:
None.

AWAYMODE:
None.

Solution 1:

It could be a Ghost. Or a demon.

Some things that caused this same issue for me were:

1. I had a very sensitive mouse and even though I was in bed, the mouse would move just very slightly but not noticably, and that woke the PC.
2. I have also had a problem with USB devices (keyboard/mice/Wireless adapters). Sometimes, and usually over a period of several years, the ports on the PC will become loosened - or something, causing the USB device to move around a little if the desk gets knocked. This caused the PC to play the "USB device removed and inserted" sound and it also caused my PC to wake from sleep.
3. Check out your Scheduled Tasks. You're bound to have a few if you're not the type to manually delete them all. If updates are cheduled to run in the background this could also be waking your pc. Look out for Google, Apple, Adobe and Java in particular. I always see them in Task Scheduler. And somehow Google update keeps reappearing.

Solution 2:

There is a certain event in the Event Viewer that may help you troubleshoot spurious wake-up issues. You can find it under Windows Logs > System; look for "Power-Troubleshooter".

However, as you see, it's not always helpful. Mine shows "Unknown" even though I woke it up using the power button.

As an IT admin, I can tell you that spurious wake-ups are difficult to diagnose and solve. There are usually a few per 100 computers experiencing spurious wake-ups even though they all have identical hardware and peripherals.

Hopefully your issue is simply caused by a USB device or network connection or such.

Solution 3:

Tricky one. Last time I had this, it was a new motherboard with a Realtek network card. These have a "wake on any packet" set, which is annoying.

Go to the network adapter properties, power management tab and tick the "Only allow a magic packet to wake the computer". For me, no more waking up at random. Realtek need a ticking off for that one.

I think it did say the waking was due to the network card, but its one place to look. Next: remove all usb devices and see if that helps.

Solution 4:

Simple disable Allow Wakeup Timers or some thing lime that in Control Panel > Power Options > Advanced Power Settings.

Otherwise, if it doesn't work, you may need to go to device manager and, for each device, go to properties and then the power options tab (Not all devices have this).

Here, you should find some checkboxes like "Allow the computer I turn off this device to save power" or "Allow this device to wake up the computer" Depending on the checkboxes checked by default, you should be able to tell if it could be the culprit.

To prevent it from waking up your computer, rather disable "allow this device to wake up this computer", or enable "Allow the computer to turn of this device to save power"

Hope this helps, and sorry if it wasn't too clear, I'm writing from my iPhone.