How To Fix a Windows 10 Computer That Keeps Waking Up

Introduction

If your Windows 10 Computer keeps waking up from sleep, this step by step tutorial will help you fix your PC from waking up in the middle of the night or when stowed in your bag.

Step 1: Determine What Cause Your Computer To Wake up

The first step, before you fix this issue, consists of identifying whats keep your Windows 10 computer waking up.

You can figure out what caused your computer to wake up most recently by using this command:

Powercfg -lastwake

Click on the Windows Start menu, type “command”, then select “Command Prompt” application

In the command prompt session, type the following command:

powercfg /LASTWAKE

If the latest command doesn’t give you any clue, you can try this command:

powercfg /WAKETIMERS

The parameter WAKETIMERS is tells the command to displays the applications that keeps your computer awake.

In this example, the scheduled task “Universal Orchestrator Start” woke the computer up from sleep.

You can also use the following command to generate a detailed system power report;

powercfg /SLEEPSTUDY

This report contains all the power state transitions (Active, Standby, Hibernate, and Shutdown) your computer experienced the past few days.

Scroll down to the bottom and find the last hibernate stat. Read in the “EXIT REASON” column, the reason why your system woke up.

In the above example, the reason was:

Timer – will execute “NT TASK\Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestrator\Universal Orchestrator Start” scheduled task that requested waking the computer.

It’s obvious the scheduled task Universal Orchestrator Start is what woke the computer up.

To disable the “Universal Orchestrator Start” task;

1. Open Task scheduler as Administrator;

2. In the Task scheduler console select; Task Scheduler Library > Microsoft > Windows > UpdateOrchestrator

Under the UpdateOrchestrator folder, select the”Universal Orchestrator Start” task, then click on the “Conditions” panel.

You need to uncheck the “Wake the computer to run this task” checkbox.

But if you do that you’are going to get an error message like this one:

This error is generated because this task runs under System account privileges that are higher than the Administrator privileges.

So unless you run the task scheduler with the system account, you can’t disable this option.

Step 3: Run Task Scheduler Under The System Account

To run a program under the system account, you can use the PSExec tool or you can use the NSudo tool.

1. Use PSExec Tool

• First download PSExec tool;
• Open a command prompt as Administrator;
• Change the current directory to the “PSExec” directory;

• Type the following command to open a new command prompt with the System account privileges:

PsExec.exe -si cmd.exe

• In the new command prompt window, type the “whoami” command, to ensure you are running it with the System account privileges:

one you ensure that you running the command prompt as the Local System user, then type “taskschd.msc” to open task scheduler and uncheck the “Wake the computer to run this task” checkbox.

2. Use Nsudo Tool

If you are not comfortable typing commands, then you can use NSudo, a graphic tool that allows you running programs with System account privileges.

• Download NSudo;
• Extract the content of the ZIP file to a location of your choice;
• Go to the following folder: \NSudo Launcher
• Right-click on NSudo.bat and choose Run as administrator
• In the user list, select “System“;
• Check “Enable All Privileges” checkbox;
• In the Open zone, type “taskschd.msc” to open the task scheduler;

On the task scheduler, repeat these steps to uncheck the “Wake the computer to run this task” checkbox.

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