How many ways can Windows turn on a computer?

My PC keeps turning itself on if i try putting it to sleep or hibernate. I know this coz i plug in my netbook to my 22" when i'm doing light work to save on electricity (Our power bill went down atleast 25% since i started doing this, 10 months of this and my last netbook was all paid for), so i'm usually sitting next to it when it turns on. There's no cat, no mouse, no power spike, and i've just used a dozen zip ties organizing the cables.

There's no timer in the bios and pressing the powerkey on the keyboard doesn't do anything.

Wake on LAN is enabled for when i need to access it from my phone from another part of the house, but there should be nothing else capable of doing it. As a test i've tried unplugging the network cable and it still turns on.

This doesn't happen when i do a full shutdown so i think it may be windows related. Is there anything else in Windows 7 capable of reactivating itself that i should look into?

mouse, keyboard, hotkey, timer, but wake on lan can cause it as well if theres something trying to access the system.. those are the only ways i know of..

To fix my computer randomly waking from sleep, I had to go into the advanced settings for my power plan, and under the "Sleep" option, set "Allow wake timers" to Disable. Apparently there are a series of timed events in 7 that can wake your computer at odd times.

Thanks. I'm trying it out.

My copy of windows 7 does run windows defender in the middle of the night. Only stipulation is that it has a connection to internet.

I didn't set this up either. So something to check also is windows task scheduler. Under Administrator Tools.

This was happening to every computer I have. I discovered that it was Windows Media Center. There is a setting in Media Center under Tasks | Settings | General | Automatic Download Options to automatically download data between a set of hours. I unchecked this as well as going into Task Scheduler and removing all check marks next to any item that had it check for "Wake the computer to run this task" under the Conditions tab. Now I can put my computers to sleep and not wake up to them burning money.

@Spectrum17
Well, my desktop's still off. Looks like it worked

I only had to do this with the desktop, the netbook has that option already turned off. It would be really bad if it suddenly turned on while in my bag.

Thanks guys!

Next time your computer wakes up on its own, open command prompt and type

powercfg -lastwake

It will tell you what woke your computer up.

I know that if I'm staticy, I can touch my metal desk and my computer sometimes turns on.

Azhar said:

Next time your computer wakes up on its own, open command prompt and type

powercfg -lastwake

It will tell you what woke your computer up.

Click to expand...

Thanks, i'm saving that in my notes file.

What i'm suprised at is that the OS now has the ability to turn on the hardware. I thought when you hibernate or sleep, everything shuts off. (Or in the sleeps case, everything except ram)

Sly said:

Thanks, i'm saving that in my notes file.

What i'm suprised at is that the OS now has the ability to turn on the hardware. I thought when you hibernate or sleep, everything shuts off. (Or in the sleeps case, everything except ram)

Click to expand...

Windows (Software) can still wake the computer from sleep for malware scans, backup jobs, or just about anything else you want it to wake up for with a custom task.

I think it's still a great feature to schedule your malware scans and updates for night. But the only sure-fire way to prevent anything from doing this is changing your Power Options to not allow anything to wake it.

Great thread: a dell with windows x64 is manually hibernated, and yet it is able to turn itself on. I hope the above settings will fix this as I would only want to manually wake the system instead of allowing windows to do so.