This has been driving me insane for a while. I thought it was MCE. I swore at MCE every time my computer buzzed into life in my room. It’s not very quiet, and it can do it so stealthily… It’ll turn itself back off so most mornings I won’t even realise it’s done it.
I only caught on because sometimes I catch it in its dirty act, and last night it actually managed to cause a BSOD so wehn I came to turn it on it had actually shut itself down, sigh.
I decided to investigate again and found this handy tip hidden away on a blog type thing:
It’s Windows Update. That sneaky little bugger. Especially useless since the wakeup event in the event viewer is handily marked as being caused by… “Unknown”. To stop this:
It is possible to disable this behavior in the group policy editor (run gpedit.msc). It’s under: Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Windows Update and the setting is called: “Enabling Windows Update Power Management to automatically wake up the system to install scheduled updates.”
I will let you know if this doesn’t fix my problem but I’m looking forward to not being woken up tonight…
EDIT: Yeah, it didn’t work. I actually caught it one night, turned the screen on just in time to see “Configuring Updates…” and then “Shutting down” at which point it turned off my machine! Funny considering the day before I’d turned off updates completly AND stopped and disabled the Windows Update service.
Last night i decided to install some updates, to see if that fixed it; after 2 hours of waiting, some installed, most failed, and it still woke up at 5am despite me turning updates back off again.
Anyone have any clues?!
EDIT 2: I’ve found a workaround, see this post: http://laurie.denness.net/blog/?p=59
What I’ve found very useful is to turn my computer off at the mains every night before I go to bed – it sure don’t wake me up then.It works for the kettle too.