Windows immediately comes out of sleep mode
Out of nowhere I started having problems with my machine staying in Sleep Mode. I would select the Sleep button, the machine would power down, then immediately start right back up even though I hadn’t touched the keyboard or clicked the mouse.
It hasn’t had this sort of problem before, so what the devil is wrong?
I started searching and found all sorts of wild ideas to try such as turning off the Power Management for the keyboard, mouse and network card. Those, sound like reasonable ideas, but the likelihood of that being the real culprit is slim to none.
One thing I did learn was a neat command called: powercfg -lastwake
Once the machine goes to sleep and then wakes again, you run that command to note what device caused the machine to wake up. Alright, now we’re getting somewhere. Some solid troubleshooting not just randomly clicking power management buttons.
Here’s the output of what I got:
C:\Users\>powercfg -lastwake
Wake History Count – 1
Wake History [0]
Wake Source Count – 1
Wake Source [0]
Type: Device
Instance Path: USB\ROOT_HUB\4&20ea87f5&0
Friendly Name:
Description: USB Root Hub
Manufacturer: (Standard USB Host Controller)
C:\Users\>
So looky there, my USB Hub is causing the machine to wake up. An odd thing, since I have a drive at the end of that chain, but it’s not currently powered on. Anyway, I pulled the USB plug from the back of the computer and what do you know, the machine went to sleep as normal.
I have no idea what’s keeping the machine awake, but that’s the cause. I have the same hub connected to another machine and don’t have any issues, however, all the drives hooked into that USB hub are always turned on. Maybe the USB hub can’t get the state of the drive so it feels compelled to stay on.
Anyway, if you’re getting stuck with a machine that won’t stay in the sleep state, run powercfg -lastwake and see what’s causing the problem. If you’re lucky it’ll give you the actual name of the device and you should have it solved in just a minute or two.
