Windows 10: Computer Will Not Go to Sleep or Stay Asleep

Computers and proper sleep have been the bane of my existence for years.

Sleep issues prove extra difficult to diagnose, in spite of hours and hours of research, because you have to wait and see what happens.

I am an experienced builder, and a relatively competent user/administrator. I'm asking for one particular computer, one I built myself, but it may bear mentioning that it seems like all computers I touch have sleep issues, even in different locations. Those are separate issues though.

• The computer in question for this post will go to sleep if told to sleep after 15 minutes or less, meaning if I set it to sleep after an hour, it is 99% assured it will never go to sleep.
• Even though it sleeps with a 15 minute or less timer, it will eventually wake up all on its own, even with the wireless keyboard and mouse physically turned off (not themselves just asleep).
• There are two displays connected as well as wired ethernet and no external USB hubs.
• Sometimes there is an Oculus Rift setup connected, but the sleep behaviors are the same if it is connected or not.
• There is very little software actually installed at all on the computer. Its duties are games/VR, and then just browsing.

I understand that it should be considered that I should just turn it off and on when I need it, but it's my personal preference that it be in "shallow" sleep to be back up in an instant.

I have read about sleep timers and believe them to be disabled. I have also read about the command line command to see the last wake event and it never displays any event ever. Perhaps unusually, Event Viewer is so clogged with "events" my fairly up to date computer can barely cope with it, and when sorting for Power issues, there is rarely anything even coinciding with the times the computer is waking up. Maybe I don't know what it is I'm supposed to be searching for.

A related wrinkle in the configuration is that I use the free tier of TeamViewer for remote access. It is my desire that the computer also sleep, but properly Wake on LAN to remote into. This may be problematic to sleep, although from what I've read it SHOULD work out fine.

Thanks for taking the time to read over this post. I'm hoping to arrive at a solution and hope providing as many details as I can will help.

:)

 

Computer Will Not Stay Asleep or Stay Shut Down

My desktop (It's an Acer, about three years old, but that's the most I know of it) has recently refused to stay asleep for longer than a few minutes (anywhere from 5-10 minutes, give or take a couple), and would only stay shutdown anywhere between a minute
to 15, until just these past couple weeks (now, it won't shut down at all, but rather it will attempt to shut down until it eventually goes to sleep, causing me to have to unplug it or force-shut down to get it off of the shutdown screen). When I bought it,
I ran Windows 8, and since then have upgraded to Windows 10, but I've been on Windows 10 for so long that I can't seem to think that's the problem. My brother's computer (like a two month old Lenovo) began having the same problem a few weeks after purchase
(whereas mine began about four weeks ago, nearly a month after his did) and his came with Windows 10.

I've reason to believe that the problem came from a traffic light USB port that we each got for Christmas. Upon plugging it in, my brother's computer had the problem the same night, but when I plugged mine is, I had no problems until the following month
or so (sorry, I may be getting my dates jumbled, but the idea remains the same). Even after unplugging these USB ports, however, the problem persisted. Both computers are all-in-one desktops, and both run Windows 10.

I've checked my power settings for issues with the timers and all, but there was nothing out of the norm. This is all I've checked so far.

Any ideas on how to fix this? I hate to see the computer continuously sleep/wake up back and forth over night, and I'm worried it may do further damage if I leave it untreated.

 

Computer Will Not Stay Asleep or Stay Shut Down

I did want to add that I tried all three methods on my computer and I can't get my computer to shut down.. I have to manually cut off the power on the power supply to get the computer to shut down.

 

Hello Stuffwhy and welcome to the forums. Sleep can be a real sticky issue as You have said. Have you tried looking at scheduled tasks and see if you have one scheduled that will wake the computer or Windows Update active hours?

Unfortunately, I don't use sleep. I have mine set to turn the monitor off after 30 minutes and never turn the hard drive off. But I have tried dealing with the issue several times. I have never come up with a solution that works for everyone.

 

Thanks for your quick reply. I will double check the Scheduled Tasks and get back to you. I can't access the system just now because I turned it off so I can't remote into it.

A scheduled task, I would assume, would explain one wake, but wouldn't explain why it wakes and doesn't ever go back to sleep. Unless it is continually sleeping and waking. I do not have the patience, obviously, to monitor it for hours and hours to see it's complete behavior.

 

Scheduled Tasks were numerous, and all seemed to be fairly standard fair, Adobe Updater, Dropbox, some nVidia things. A few things had schedules and a couple had some kind of repetition - throwing some caution to the wind I edited most of the tasks to only run when a user was logged in, as opposed to at a System level, where it seemed they would run themselves at will.

After doing this, I used the computer for a few minutes and manually put it to sleep. It woke up INSTANTLY. Vexed, I checked the Event Viewer and it seemed as though the Oculus software had woken it up. I killed the Oculus software and put it back to sleep. And I waited. And after about two minutes it woke back up. Again, it appeared to be a piece of Oculus software, and I killed off every Oculus thread I could. And I repeated. It woke up again after about three minutes or so, this time citing that the Killer Ethernet card had woken the system. No more specific reason cited. Beyond fed up, I just shut it down.

It's just beyond me that the computer can't just sleep. Microsoft's live support checked a few things, but then gently suggested subscribing to their support for 150 dollars, which is outside my budget and also a bit nuts, and I have little faith they would even be able to help sufficiently at a full paid tier.

 

Stuffwhy, I'm not sure I can help much. I have found that in many cases the computer will wake up because some app or service decides to start running. Pretty much the same with a computer refusing to sleep. Some app is doing something and doesn't want to quit. I am going to give you a few tutorials that may help you. You may also look at the bottom of each tutorial for related tutorials. Hopefully they will help. The first one is for Laptops and battery usage. But, there may be some info in there that will help. It is still about what services are running and what activity is going on in the background while in sleep.
Generate Sleep Study Report in Windows 10 Performance Maintenance Tutorials
See Wake Source in Windows 10 Performance Maintenance Tutorials
Add System unattended sleep timeout to Power Options in Windows 10 Performance Maintenance Tutorials
Add Allow sleep with remote opens to Power Options in Windows 10 Performance Maintenance Tutorials

 

Sigh. The computer is sleeping fairly normally now. I can't even be happy because I don't have a firm understanding of why, or how to get back to this corrected state in the future if things go awry again.

I did get the Fall Creator's Update to Windows 10. It's hard to assume that was the fix I needed... anyway, Thanks.

 

At least you have it running right now. Good work. What did you do to get it right?

 

Only sat by while the Fall Creator's Update ran itself.

 

*Thumbs Well, that's a positive with the FCU. We usually only hear the negatives.