Windows 7 gave my PC insomnia
Posted on 25th Jun 2009 at 16:07 by Clive Webster with 29 comments
I’ve never really liked Windows Vista – it had too many annoying habits and not enough good ones for me to bother with it. However, I was always envious of its Sleep mode – Hibernate in XP is fine, but Vista's Sleep is much better. I was therefore keen to use Sleep after installing the Windows 7 RC, but there was a problem.
I could put my PC to sleep, but after a short period – sometimes just minutes, sometimes up to an hour – my PC would wake up again. Unfortunately my PC is in my bedroom, isn’t particularly quiet, and has far too many blue-LED fans in it. Imagine my response when I was awakened by weird-looking light show and loud whirring sounds at 1am. The bedsheets remained dry, but it was a close call in my confused and groggy state.
The odd thing was, the PC wasn’t doing anything. It wasn’t downloading a fake update, or starting a virus scan, or running some other scheduled event; nothing was happening, it had just woken up.
Windows 7 has given my PC insomnia.
Some hunting on the interwebs turned up this article on Sleep issues with Windows 7. It seems that Windows 7 has some odd network controller behaviour by default – even when the PC is in a power-down state, the network controller feels it needs to poll the network to update its status. Why, I have no idea; the PC’s off, so it has no need to update anything until the power comes back.
Anyway, the way to fix this is to enter Device Manager, right-click on your network controller(s),click Properties and go to the Power Management tab. Then de-select the option "Allow this device to wake the computer." It says on the forum post I’ve linked to that this is a problem with XP and Vista, but none of the Vista or XP PCs I’ve checked give the network controller the power to wake the PC by default, so it does like a Windows 7 quirk.
As the post says, opening the command prompt and entering powercfg -devicequery wake_armed does give you a readout of every device that has the Power of Insomnia, so you can hunt out other devices causing Sleep issues if the network controller wasn’t to blame. Happily, I can now use Sleep mode, though I’m not sure that this is the full reason for why I woke up so early this morning that I was in the office 20 minutes early.
I could put my PC to sleep, but after a short period – sometimes just minutes, sometimes up to an hour – my PC would wake up again. Unfortunately my PC is in my bedroom, isn’t particularly quiet, and has far too many blue-LED fans in it. Imagine my response when I was awakened by weird-looking light show and loud whirring sounds at 1am. The bedsheets remained dry, but it was a close call in my confused and groggy state.
The odd thing was, the PC wasn’t doing anything. It wasn’t downloading a fake update, or starting a virus scan, or running some other scheduled event; nothing was happening, it had just woken up.
Windows 7 has given my PC insomnia.
Some hunting on the interwebs turned up this article on Sleep issues with Windows 7. It seems that Windows 7 has some odd network controller behaviour by default – even when the PC is in a power-down state, the network controller feels it needs to poll the network to update its status. Why, I have no idea; the PC’s off, so it has no need to update anything until the power comes back.
Anyway, the way to fix this is to enter Device Manager, right-click on your network controller(s),click Properties and go to the Power Management tab. Then de-select the option "Allow this device to wake the computer." It says on the forum post I’ve linked to that this is a problem with XP and Vista, but none of the Vista or XP PCs I’ve checked give the network controller the power to wake the PC by default, so it does like a Windows 7 quirk.
As the post says, opening the command prompt and entering powercfg -devicequery wake_armed does give you a readout of every device that has the Power of Insomnia, so you can hunt out other devices causing Sleep issues if the network controller wasn’t to blame. Happily, I can now use Sleep mode, though I’m not sure that this is the full reason for why I woke up so early this morning that I was in the office 20 minutes early.
29 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyNow I'm on Windows7, I shall see if your tip helps. Thanks.
I mumbled something along the lines of "What the ****" in my semi-conscious state, turned it off again, and went to bed. Nothing since. Very odd.
And since there is no OS running that can turn the PC on, I am still to this day confused as hell.
Was it Media Center Edition? MCE wakes the PC at the same time every day to update the EPG, then doesn't bother putting it back into standby, but there's a tool to change the time (no way to change it through Windows natively however!)
I recall the same by many people who tried Vista beta.. but was fixed once Vista was out and official drivers (and sometimes BIOS update) was released.
I expect the same as under Win7.
You can see the Event log of WIn7 to see what makes it wake up, it could be a device that does this.
I have Win7 RC 64-bit on my laptop (dual boot with Vista), it's the Latitude E6400 with the Nvidia Quadro NVS 160M. And despite having Vista 64-bit drivers, and Win7 beta drivers for the video card, it doesn't have any sleep problem.
My old computer had a bad power supply, I'd try and turn it on then wait....and wait....and wait....untill about 10 hours afterwards at 5am it would decide to turn on XD gotta love dodgy power supplies :)
That is because you do something that you should not do... probably attaching a bad device, or enabled USB wake-up, or play with the BIOS sleep option.
dicobalt has a point, Goodbytes - pretty much every system I've overclocked has had issues with low-power states once taken more than about 5% out of spec. In XP it usually resulted in Standby refusing to come back, or just plain resetting the system rather than going into Standby... in Vista/Win7 it either refuses to wake up, or goes into Sleep then immediately goes back to the Windows login prompt.
The only device that sleep worked perfectly for me is also my EeePC, though I have the 4G.
I have 10-11 systems that I build with 2000, XP, Vista, Win7 in the course of my life (considered as official builds). Excluding any beta version and considerate latest BIOS and drivers, all my system overclocked or not, sleep and hibernates all correctly. Even back in days where I was too young to build computers and did not even have the internet, Win95 and 98 worked correctly for us, I and my older brothers and parents don't recall such issue.
My experience was always assemble the system, install Windows then driver and system is up and running correctly. After OC, it still works correctly.
If OEM's can do it, so can you.
Dell XPS M1210 - Core Duo 2Ghz - 2.5GbDDR667 - GeFoce Go7400 - 320Gb 7200rpm
Those old printers were old, and mine scared the **** outta me.
*typo*
The thing I am currently banging my head against is when i hibernate the machine (via remote control), when i wake it from hibernate (still via remote control) it powers up, then goes off again. Always wakes and starts working the second time i wake it. Very odd.
Glad you spelled that correctly!! lol
Actually knowing that the Geforce GTX makes 1 or 2 buzzing sound and have the fan speed up at max speed and delay the system actually startup, it's like if the GPU need a lot of power to startup due to some cost cutting decision done on the PCB with cheap hacks probably done at the firmware level to make it startup. Probably suggest that you have a hardware inside of your computer that causes this problem as maybe the motherboard can't deliver the power or the hardware was untested with such setup, or maybe the PSU acts funny as coming out of hibernate is not the same as an actual start up... some crash thing like that.
Bit-tech, you guys have countless amount of hardware coming at you on the shelves, you should try that next time you review a motherboard or have free time :) I mean if I have it working, so does OEM's... you guys should.
Update your BIOS as I had a problem simular to that which went away when I updated the BIOS.
I'm running Win7 Build 7600 x64 at the moment and I'm really happy BUT my graphics card acts up... again. I had the same problem with 7056 and 7100, nvldd...dll crashes randomly. No matter what driver I use, no matter what I do [video, browsing, gaming, idling]. Quite annoying to be honest.
Anybody got any idea on what that might be? Maybe it's just time to upgrade my 8800GTS/640, eh?
Could be faulty card which sends a signal of overheating to the drivers. Which then makes the driver crash to stop all programs from using the GPU. An easy way to prevent work loss and continue to use the system all by making itself happy.
win 7 does treat memory differently than vista, so it could be the case that nvidia needs to write a driver for it.. but try the sweeper and see what happens