You should all now know about the cool new Vista power options feature where you can use very low power to sleep your PC and wake up ready to go at a moments notice. But what we are hearing from many of our users is that quite often they will come back to their computer to find it on, burning electricity.

There are a few things that may be causing Vista to wake up out of a nap, hopefully these tweaks should let your Vista PC sleep well and not burn up energy.

A Device is Waking Your PC Up?

Your PC may be getting woken up by a device that is set to wake up your PC. To check what devices are waking up your computer and how to fix the problem just read the following;

  • Open cmd (run as administrator)
  • Type this at the command prompt;
    • powercfg –devicequery wake_armed
  • This will show you a list of devices that will wake up your PC

You can disable a device from waking up your PC by doing this;

  • Open device manager
  • Find your suspect device
  • Right click and press properties
  • Click the power management tab
  • Uncheck ‘allow this device to wake the computer’
  • Click OK
Powercfg

Stop Your Network Card From Waking Up Your PC

Just like your devices your network card can also wake your Vista machine up, you can disable this feature by doing this;

  • Go to device manager
  • Expand network adapters
  • Right click on your network card and click properties
  • Make sure ‘allow this device to wake the computer’ is unchecked
  • Click OK

Edit Multimedia Power Options

You may want to perform this tweak so your multimedia features won’t wake up your PC;

  • Type power options in your start bar
  • Click change plan settings on your power plan
  • Click change advanced power settings
  • Scroll down and expand multimedia settings
  • Expand when sharing media
  • Choose allow the computer to sleep (you can decide if you want this on battery, plugged in or both)
  • Done
Multimedia Power Options