Sleep mode not working properly, so looking for some advice

berlin88

Distinguished
Oct 23, 2009
108
3
18,685
I have a Windows 7 PC, and recently, I have been having troubles with sleep mode.

Problem #1: About half the time, I will put the computer in sleep mode, and it will immediately wake itself up without me telling it to do so. Sometimes I can put it in sleep mode multiple times, and it will insist on waking up almost right away. However, sometimes it can wait several hours or more before waking itself up, again without my telling it to do so.

Problem #2: The other half of the time, the computer will enter sleep mode, and it will refuse to wake up from sleep mode. Hitting buttons on the keyboard or pressing the power button on the computer case fail to wake it up.

When the computer refuses to wake up form sleep mode, I have to unplug the computer from the outlet, and then plug the power cable back in. After doing this, I can get the computer to wake up and it will resume running, but having to do this, gets rather annoying after a while.

What causes this problem? Do I have a hardware issue?


Computer Specs:

Antec 1200 vs
Corsair 650TX
EVGA GTX 960
AsRock 990FX Extreme 4
AMD FX-8320
Gskill 16GB memory (2x 8GB)
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB
WD 1TB Caviar Black x2
LG Blue-Ray Drive
Vizio Sound Bar
Asus HDMI Monitor
Logitech Keyboard / Mouse
 
Solution
Something to keep in mind: every time you plug a USB peripheral into a USB port on your computer it hasn't been attached to before, it's installed as a new device in Windows, resetting such things to defaults as the settings on the Power Management tab in Device Manager.

If your mouse is set to be able to wake the computer from sleep, any mouse activity will wake the computer. About the only way you're not going to trigger mouse movement with something like an optical mouse is to flip the mouse over so the sensor can't see anything. Why your mouse didn't cause you problems before, I can't say. I could pose the question, have you recently changed the USB port your mouse is plugged into or changed the surface that the mouse is resting...
Could be hardware, could be software.

A great place to start is at a Command Prompt.

At the Command Prompt, run the command powercfg /devicequery wake_armed, and you will receive a list of devices that are allowed to wake the computer from sleep mode. The usual suspect in my book when a computer wakes up immediately after being put to sleep is the mouse.

Once you have your list of devices that are able to wake the computer from sleep, using Device Manager you can modify the properties to disable it's ability to wake the computer. Locate the device you don't want to wake the computer in Device Manager, open the properties page by double left-clicking the device, then on the Power Management tab, deselect the appropriate check boxes.

You can rerun the devicequery in a Command Prompt window after making changes, and see that those devices will no longer be able to wake your computer.

At the hardware level, I have seen some motherboards that refuse to wake from sleep if Hardware Virtualization is enabled for your CPU. This would be a setting that needs be changed in BIOS, but you may be stuck with it If you use any sort of Virtual PC or hypervisor software.

You might also consider enabling hybrid sleep mode, if it's not already turned on. Hybrid sleep essentially writes a hibernate file to the hard drive when you put the machine to sleep so that if the machine fails to resume from RAM, it can still resume from the hard drive hibernation file. Whether this is faster than just booting from scratch or not however is something you'll have to test. On a fast machine, hibernating isn't as useful as it once was, so may not provide much benefit in the case of a failure to resume from sleep.
 

berlin88

Distinguished
Oct 23, 2009
108
3
18,685



I checked the command prompt, and its ethernet, mouse and keyboard as being allowed to wake the computer.

My problems only started recently, so I have no idea what would have changed to cause my problems, since no settings have been changed recently. Its only been in the last month or so, that I have had the issue of the computer refusing to wake up from sleep.


 
Something to keep in mind: every time you plug a USB peripheral into a USB port on your computer it hasn't been attached to before, it's installed as a new device in Windows, resetting such things to defaults as the settings on the Power Management tab in Device Manager.

If your mouse is set to be able to wake the computer from sleep, any mouse activity will wake the computer. About the only way you're not going to trigger mouse movement with something like an optical mouse is to flip the mouse over so the sensor can't see anything. Why your mouse didn't cause you problems before, I can't say. I could pose the question, have you recently changed the USB port your mouse is plugged into or changed the surface that the mouse is resting on, or have pets or children that may have bumped the table where the mouse is located? Any way you slice it, my first recommendation, now that we're this far is to, flip the mouse so it can't wake the computer before putting the computer to sleep, or disable the mouse's ability to wake the computer.

See if that helps with the issue of waking unexpectedly.
 
Solution