Your Windows PC randomly waking from sleep can be a nuisance. One of the most common reasons for your PC to wake from sleep randomly is your WiFi card. For example, recently, I put my PC to sleep before going to bed. However, the network card randomly woke my PC from sleep at midnight and stayed ON for more than six hours before I saw it. As you can guess, that’s a lot of wasted energy and unnecessary power bill.
There are several reasons why your WiFi card wakes your PC. Some of them include but are not limited to network tasks such as updates & backups, incoming network traffic, Wake-on-LAN (WoL), and schedule tasks.
If you don’t want this happening, follow the below steps and learn how to stop your WiFi card from waking your PC from sleep. Let’s get started.
Before You Begin
You need administrative rights to change WiFi card settings via Device Manager in Windows.
Stop WiFi Card from Waking Windows PC
To stop your WiFi card from waking your computer, you need to modify the card’s power management setting. Here’s how to do it.
1. Right-click on the Start button on the taskbar and select Device Manager.
2. In the Device Manager window, expand the Network Adapters section.
3. Right-click on the WiFi card and select Properties.
4. Go to the Power Management tab in the WiFi card properties window.
5. Uncheck the following checkboxes.
- Allow this device to wake the computer
- Only allow a magic packet to wake the computer
6. Go to the Advanced tab.
7. Select Wake on Magic Packet under ‘Property’ and select Disabled from the ‘Value’ dropdown menu.
8. Click OK to save changes.
Close the Device Manager window and restart your computer.
That’s it. From now on, your WiFi card will not wake your PC from sleep. If you have any questions, comment below and I will answer and help.
