Sleep wows. Why won't Microsoft let my machine sleep?

[PaulCa]

Hi,

I have had this problem for ages. Tried various things, but it still fights me. I allow (or ask) my media centre PCs to go to sleep so they can be awoken with the keyboard. This works, per-sae, but Windows keeps getting involved.

For example, it was waking them up once a day around 2pm to check for updates. If there aren't any, it goes back to sleep. If however there ARE updates, it downloads them, then demands you restart it and it WILL NOT go back to sleep until you physically attend to it.

I disabled wake notifications which seems to stop it waking up everyday to check for updates, but... frequently I find it sitting wide awake, having been left idle overnight! Worse than that, I have put my bedroom TV to sleep, followed it to sleep only to wake up in the middle of the night to find it has woken itself up and UNPAUESD the YouTube video I was playing in the process which is now squeaking out of the built in speaker.

This is accompanied with Windows insistence to completely ignore the "Shutdown" button. In my view it's very clear what that button does, but Windows 10 seems to think it knows better. IF there are updates available and the chose it wants is Updates and Restart or Update and shutdown, then the ACPI Shutdown event is ignored. That is extremely irritating.

This is made worse for me, because I use the availability of "pings" to those machines to set the heating targets! It's annoying to get up in the morning after a cold night to find the livingroom radiator has been running all night to keep it 20*C in there, just to keep Microsoft update warm!

These are all Dell Optiplex machines, running Windows 10 Pro. My office PC does not appear to behave this way running "Home" edition. However, I never use sleep on it, but it does shutdown when asked.

 

[Rroff]

I've had to resort to using 3rd party tools of various degrees of trustable including ShutUp10 and Windows Update Blocker (and just pray there is no malware) to be able to sort things like that including sleep. (ShutUp10 no longer reliably prevents updates and some other stuff, but does disable other undesirable features).

It might be worth breaking out Process Monitor ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon ) and see what happens when the machine(s) is/are idle - it may be an errant task is keeping them awake - I recently was trying to troubleshoot one system where once the system was idle >5 minutes the system process would start to hog all of 1 core 100% keeping the system from sleeping and I finally tracked it down to being a variant of this problem:

https://lastland.net/tech/bugs/HighCPUUse.htm

ntoskrnl.exe!seaccesscheckwithhint+0x1c790 in my case was the most usual form of it. If I forced it to sleep from the command line it would wake up and then that would start happening about 30 seconds later and never stop until I rebooted...

They seriously need to fire the whole development team and hire some people who aren't complete muppets. The implementation of updates is just pants on head levels of stupid - to the point they are either purposefully being obnoxious or have some ulterior motive for it (or they really are that stupid they have no idea how it actually works in the real world).

 

[PaulCa]

I hear you cynicism and raise you a conspiracy... that Windows 10 updates may possibly start to introduce 'deliberate obsolescence' bugs which are of course 'fixed' in Windows 11.

I also expect, since asking and begging hasn't made people use Edge, they will start to bribe people. "FREE upgrade to windows 11 + 3 years office IF you only use Edge browser". I think it all shows us that Edge (and Chrome) make a whole LOT of money for their data mining companies.

 

[Rroff]

I also expect, since asking and begging hasn't made people use Edge, they will start to bribe people. "FREE upgrade to windows 11 + 3 years office IF you only use Edge browser". I think it all shows us that Edge (and Chrome) make a whole LOT of money for their data mining companies.

The irony here is if they actually built a compelling product and listened to what people want (that doesn't necessarily mean exactly providing it in that fashion) they'd have no problem getting people to use it. Same with the Windows/MS Store... I have to facepalm every time I'm reminded they can't even get a basic store system right.

 

[Django x2]

Sorting out what is causing sleep issues is a relatively straight forward task. Fixing them is a relatively straight forward task (use local policy and configure it properly to manage the behaviour of sleep states), in particular, Allow standby states (S1 to S3) disabled (battery and power if on a laptop). That is literally all you have to do.

 

[Rroff]

Sorting out what is causing sleep issues is a relatively straight forward task. Fixing them is a relatively straight forward task (use local policy and configure it properly to manage the behaviour of sleep states), in particular, Allow standby states (S1 to S3) disabled (battery and power if on a laptop). That is literally all you have to do.

Often it isn't - sometimes poorly written drivers can prevent a machine going into sleep which can be complex to narrow down let alone identify a fix - sometimes there might be a different driver version which fixes it, sometimes energy management options in devices, sometimes you have to fiddle in the registry or it might not even be possible to work around if there is only the one driver release and/or having to fallback to generic MS drivers which may not provide full performance or features.

Then you get instances like above where a malfunctioning Windows component was preventing sleep, causing issues in resume if you forced a sleep, and was incredibly difficult to identify the problem and fix it.

Then like above sometimes Windows automatic update process can cause a machine to stay awake regardless of settings in local policy - even when settings should sort it.

 

[Django x2]

Often it isn't - sometimes poorly written drivers can prevent a machine going into sleep which can be complex to narrow down let alone identify a fix - sometimes there might be a different driver version which fixes it, sometimes energy management options in devices, sometimes you have to fiddle in the registry or it might not even be possible to work around if there is only the one driver release and/or having to fallback to generic MS drivers which may not provide full performance or features.

Then you get instances like above where a malfunctioning Windows component was preventing sleep, causing issues in resume if you forced a sleep, and was incredibly difficult to identify the problem and fix it.

Then like above sometimes Windows automatic update process can cause a machine to stay awake regardless of settings in local policy - even when settings should sort it.

Ah the windows update is easy to sort, that's the orchestrator scheduled task. Windows will always report what woke it up. It has to, otherwise it wouldn't wake up, so that's the dodgy driver issue dealt with too.

Just to add. I serviced an office full of Dell Optiplex machines, of all varieties, 3050, 3070, 5020, 5050, 5070, all running Windows 10 with simple GPO settings and none of them ignored sleep settings.

 

[Rroff]

Ah the windows update is easy to sort, that's the orchestrator scheduled task. Windows will always report what woke it up. It has to, otherwise it wouldn't wake up, so that's the dodgy driver issue dealt with too.

Just to add. I serviced an office full of Dell Optiplex machines, of all varieties, 3050, 3070, 5020, 5050, 5070, all running Windows 10 with simple GPO settings and none of them ignored sleep settings.

Not always what wakes it up but what can prevent it sleeping as well - even if it reports a specific driver it often isn't as simple as that as sometimes it is just a driver component where the problem is manifesting. I've spent way too much of my life trying to troubleshoot this kind of stuff.

Dell Optiplex and similar OEM builds are generally, though not always, less problematic as they are designed for a purpose from the ground up and things like energy management are often a factor for systems which will end up in offices and schools, etc. for more general consumer focussed brands, self-builds, etc. it can be much more problematic especially if you start throwing in things like USB WiFi adaptors, sound cards, etc.

 

[PaulCa]

The machines I have issues with are Dell Optiplex. Corporate surplus circa 2012/2014 vintage.

However they don't have their OEM install anymore, just a vanila Windows 10 Pro.

Both are wired ethernet, no wifi, no bluetooth although both have a USB keyboard/mouse dongle. Both do wake on mouse/keyboard. I like that. However the normally don't wake up if the wireless pad is switched off. When it's all working correctly, I just switch the TV off, the wireless keyboard off (to stop the cat turning it back on!) and leave the room/go to sleep and the PC goes to sleep 10 minutes later. It should remain asleep until someone turns the keyboard on and presses a button.

A lot of the time this does work absolutely as intended. It's the fact that occassional, for whatever whim or reason Windows decides to intervene. Waking up daily to look for updates, I think I killed with disabling "Wake timers" service. But it seems that when windows updates are pending install/restart windows removes "sleep" automation entirely. It also removes "Shutdown" ability from the physical power button. It is basically saying, "I am not going away until you choose one of "Update and shutdown" or "Update and restart"", athough you "can" force it to just restart or shutdown, but it won't do it automatically is what I'm saying. The result is, you find the living room PC sitting up all night because it didn't even respond to the shutdown button being pressed when I left it, NOR did it timeout and sleep.

Anyway, there have been some updates to windows since I last took much note of their behaviour, so I'll watch out for it and ping back here while it's occuring to see what we can learn then.

Cheers