My gaming-PC is couple years old and one day it didn't want to sleep anymore. Which is pretty weird. It has been working ok since I built it, but now something really weird happened. I Googled a couple of articles with keywords "windows 7 random wake from sleep" to confirm that it's not just my breaking down hardware, but a real issue.
Normally I don't shut down my PC, I just let it sleep when not being used. It is pretty modern piece of hardware and does not consume very much electricity during sleep. It also "boots" from the sleep pretty fast on a mouse or keyboard click. My initial fix was to reboot it and shut it down, and even turn off the power supply power to make sure it stays down. No matter what I tried, it just keeps popping up after random period of time. It could be 15 minutes or couple or hours.
Mr. Jack Ukleja found the actual reason for this behaviour. He has an execellent article in his blog. It appears that network adapter's Wake on pattern caused this. He also describes a way to see why Windows was woken last time. In my case Windows power configuration somehow gets it wrong. When I do a:
powercfg -lastwake
from command line, it gives me:
Wake History Count - 1
Wake History [0]
Wake Source Count - 1
Wake Source [0]
Type: Device
Instance Path: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_1503&SUBSYS_849C1043&REV_05\3&11583659&0&C8
Friendly Name:
Description: Intel(R) 82579V Gigabit Network Connection
Manufacturer: Intel
... which most certainly is not the case here. I tapped a mouse button to wake this up.
Anyway, in his case he had a Realtek Gigabit Ethernet NIC and fixed the issue by disabling Wake on pattern from NIC's advanced settings. Even though I have an Intel Gigabit NIC, I had to try the same. It helped. I don't know if it is a factor, that in my PC there are two NICs and the another one is a Realtek Gigabit NIC. Anyway, now my PC is back in order. It stays sleep when I put it to sleep the way it is supposed to do.
