Computer keeps turning itself on every night

I didn’t have time last night or this evening to mess with the time and see what happens. However, I did unplug the router and modem completely last night and the computer still turned on this morning. I’ll try and shut it down completely tonight and see what happens.

So that eliminates wake on lan.

So either something in windows or something in the bios. Doing a complete shutdown tonight (no hibernate, suspend or sleep) should tell us which one of those it is since nothing in windows is capable of powering the computer on from a complete shutdown.

There is one other possibility, though pretty unlikely. If you’re having some weird power issue at 1am every day that could be causing the computer to power back up. This happened at one of our hospital credit unions. Every day at 6:15am the hospital would do some backup power test and things weren’t properly isolated. The resulting power hiccup caused all kinds of computer issues, including computer that would boot from power off state) until an electrician resolved the issue with the backup power system.

Ok so I completely shut it down last night and it did not turn itself on. I had to open the screen and manually hit the power button to turn it on. So, where does that leave us? Windows issue?

I don’t think it would be anything weird with the power, since it has the same issue whenever I take it somewhere and on battery power.

Take battery out every night? lol

I could just turn it off and not hibernate it, if I were to go that route.

I suppose I could always turn it off each night, but I’m just to impatient to wait for the whole thing to load everything.

Windows setting of some sort, stemming from sleep mode or hibernation most likely. I’d probably have to look physically to poke around. Half of being a good tech is just clicking around looking at settings.

+1 This would be my guess as well. Doing a virus scan would be my first step (although I don’t think an infection would wake the computer).

It has to be one of the windows tasks then.

Backup, defrag, windows update, virus scan ect.

Defrag on my 7 machines happens to be scheduled for 1am now that I just checked it. (right click the drive, properties, tools, defrag now, configure schedule).

I don’t think I ever touched that so I’m assuming 1am is the default. Mine is only set for Wednesdays though.

One more thing to try, even though you said you looked at the scheduled tasks and none were set for that time.

  1. Open Power Options by clicking the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Security, and then clicking Power Options.
  2. On the Select a power plan page, click Change plan settings for the plan that you want to change.
  3. On the Change settings for the plan page, click Change advanced power settings.
  4. On the Advanced settings tab, expand Sleep, expand Allow wake timers, choose Disable for both when your computer is running on battery and when it’s plugged in, and then click OK.