The Sleep mode in Windows is simply amazing. Not only can you reserve power but everything that you are working on will be saved and resumed like nothing happened. It is very much like pausing a video and then running it later, you would have never known it was paused. However, I find it mildly infuriating when I move my mouse just a tiny bit by mistake or I touch my desk and my laptop is suddenly back on. Thankfully, you can disable specific devices from waking up your computer. If you already know what device is causing your problem, skip to the end of the article. Otherwise, I will first try to show you how you can find out what devices are waking your computer up.
CMD and Event Viewer
After you open the command line tool, type in the following command: powercfg / lastwake.
This will display a list of the device or devices that woke up your computer the last time it was in the sleep mode. There is a lot of information there but what you want to be looking from is the “Instance Path” and the “Type”. If you also want to show all the devices that are set to wake up your computer, type the following command: powercfg /devicequery wake_armed. Finally, if you want to see all the devices that can be enabled to wake up your computer, type the following command: powercfg /devicequery wake_programmable.
Using the command line does not always give you interpretable results. Sometimes the Instant Path and Type will only be numbers or random letters and you will not be able to find the device that way. If that happens, simply open the Event Viewer by typing “eventvwr.msc” in the Search field of the Start menu or the Start Screen. Navigate to Windows Logs>System. In the right sidebar, choose the “Filter Current Log” option. In the window that opens, select the “Power-Troubleshooter” option from the Event sources drop down menu. These are the waking up events of your computer. Simply find the one with the right date and time and double click on it to see more information.
The solution
Once you have identified the source of your problem, you will need to actually solve the issue. For this you will need to go to the Device Manager. Search for it in the Start menu or right click on “Computer” in the Start menu, select properties and then choose Device Manager from the left sidebar. When you go there, find the device, right click on it and choose Properties. Finally, navigate to the Power Management tab and uncheck the option that says “Allow this device to wake the computer”. Do not forget to click OK to close the window. It is a pretty simple thing to do thankfully so once you find the culprit it will only be a matter of seconds before you can put your computer to sleep without any more annoying interactions.
