Troubleshooting PCs spontaneously waking from sleep

[Valantar]

I back up (5) networked PCs to my box, then my box gets backed up to a HD Dock to be removed off site 1st thing in the AM... before that, AV scanners run, both on my box and then my scanner scans all the storage devices on the (5) networked PCs (yes Im anal about it) and then HDs get defragged before the backups start. I don't want any of that hapening while Im running AutoCAD ... or playing Witcher 3

Also be aware ... electronic components, like circuit boards, incandescent bulbs, etc. suffer more "wear and tear" from thermal cycling ... cold +> hot = > cold => hot than they do from sitting doing nothing at the same temp.

(Luckily?) I haven't quite reached that level of dedication (is that the right word?) quite yet. I'm planning on splitting my HTPC/NAS into a dedicated NAS and a new, smaller HTPC, but until that time, I'm happy with that being the only PC running 24/7 in my house. Prefer my always-on PCs to be quiet and low-power.

As for thermal cycling, that's one of the pros of water cooling, I suppose: both my CPU and GPU are in the low 30s under normal desktop usage. Not much change over ambient, in other words


I've now disabled waking from two things through powercfg: my Xbox receiver ( ) and Ethernet controller. What's left is "HID-compliant mouse", "HID Keyboard Device" and "HID Keyboard Device (001)". At least two of those are my Lenovo keyboard (yes, it's an external ThinkPad keyboard, it has a trackpoint. Yes, I use it.), though I suppose I'll have to investigate a bit to figure out why there are three devices listed. Suppose I should disable hibernation to see if this really helps, but I'll leave that till tomorrow.

 

[jboydgolfer]

If this is actually a thing, I'd definitely want to look into it, but it definitely sounds odd to me.

The suggestions I listed are actual resolutions to the problem you're experiencing that ive used in the past when i went through it personally ( i'm not "electrician minded", so I can't say why or how the orientation of a header plug would ,or wouldn't affect or cause this issue, but I do know that it resolved the problem in a previous computer of mine). in full disclosure , my situation wasn't just waking up from sleep but also powering on after shut down.

I know its a frustrating problem to troubleshoot, and I realize you may have tried some of the things I or others have listed, but I have found in the past that it's often things that I thought I had addressed properly, but turned out I hadn't ,so when I encounter issues like this ,I normally try everything (even if I have in the past) at the cost of being redundant . one of those "i tried that solution before, and it didnt work, but now it did, and i dont care since the issue is gone now" situations.

 

[Valantar]

The suggestions I listed are actual resolutions to the problem you're experiencing that ive used in the past when i went through it personally ( i'm not "electrician minded", so I can't say why or how the orientation of a header plug would ,or wouldn't affect or cause this issue, but I do know that it resolved the problem in a previous computer of mine). in full disclosure , my situation wasn't just waking up from sleep but also powering on after shut down.

I know its a frustrating problem to troubleshoot, and I realize you may have tried some of the things I or others have listed, but I have found in the past that it's often things that I thought I had addressed properly, but turned out I hadn't ,so when I encounter issues like this ,I normally try everything (even if I have in the past) at the cost of being redundant . one of those "i tried that solution before, and it didnt work, but now it did, and i dont care since the issue is gone now" situations.

That's definitely a good approach, if a frustrating one

As for my questioning of the possibility of header orientation mattering, I didn't mean to come off like I was accusing you of making stuff up or anything, it was just an utterly baffling suggestion that I would never - ever! - have thought of myself. It would be really interesting if someone with some electrical/electronic insight could explain this, but for now, I'll put it on the "try if all else fails" list.


For now, it seems like @Assimilator 's "disable everything with powercfg" method is working. At least my PC has stayed asleep today. This has happened before (some days might be utterly fine, while on others it wakes up constantly), so I'll have to wait it out, but I'm hopeful. Crossing my fingers that this is finally solved!