Have you ever wondered why does your PC wake up from sleep by itself? The simple reason is that one of your hardware devices like the network card, mouse, keyboard, etc., is waking your PC randomly. For example, if your mouse supports Wake on Mouse, moving or pressing the mouse button will wake up the computer. Similarly, if your network card supports Wake on LAN, the PC will wake up on a magic packet, sometimes even randomly. In this article, I will show you two methods to find out what’s waking your PC from sleep. Once you find the culprit, you can modify that device’s power management settings to stop it from waking your PC from sleep in the future.
Before You Begin
You need administrative rights to find which device is waking Windows from sleep.
Note: The steps below are tested to work on Windows 11, 10, 8, and 7.
Steps to Find What’s Waking Your PC from Sleep
There are two methods to identify which device woke your PC. You can either use the Event Viewer program or run a command in the Command Prompt window. I will show both methods. Follow the one you like.
Method 1: Use Event Viewer to Find Wake Sources
Every time your device wakes from sleep, the Event Viewer tracks it and notes down essential information like sleep time, wake time, and most importantly, Wake Source. The wake source tells you which hardware in your PC is responsible for waking your system.
First, click on the Start button, search for Event Viewer, and click Open.
Go to the Windows Logs > System folder on the left sidebar.
Click on the Filter Current Log option under the “Actions” section on the right sidebar.
In the “Event Sources” field, enter Power-Troubleshooter and click OK.
Note: To further narrow down the search, set a time frame using the “Logged” dropdown menu at the top. For example, you can narrow down the results to last 24 hours.
The above action will filter the events. From the list, find the recent “Power-Troubleshooter” event and select it.
You will see what woke your PC next to Wake Source under the “General” tab. For instance, my WiFi card woke my PC. So, if I stop it from doing it, my computer will not wake by itself in the future.
Method 2: Command to Find Devices Responsible for Waking Your PC
To find all the devices that can wake your PC, we are going to use the ‘powercfg’ command. Here’s how.
First, open the Start menu by pressing the Windows logo key on your keyboard.
In the Start menu, search for Command Prompt and click on the Run as Administrator option.
In the Command Prompt window, run the following command.
powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
This command will list all the hardware devices that can wake your computer from sleep. For instance, as you can see from the screenshot below, both my network cards (Ethernet & WiFi) are capable of waking my system from sleep.
Use Device Manager to Stop A Hardware Device from Waking Your PC
Once you have the list of all devices that are capable of waking your PC, you can disable that functionality from the Device Manager. That way, they can no longer wake your PC randomly. Here’s how.
Right-click on the Windows logo on the taskbar and select Device Manager.
In the Device Manager, find the device, right-click on it, and select Properties.
Navigate to the Power Management tab and uncheck the Allow this device to wake the computer checkbox.
Click the OK button.
That’s it. That device will no longer wake your computer from sleep. If you have more devices, follow the same steps for all of them.
And there you have it! If your computer is randomly waking up from sleep, follow the steps shown above to identify all the devices capable of waking your PC and disable that feature via Device Manager.