I put my PC in sleep mode last night, as usual. It powered itself down, but after a short while (maybe a minute) it powered itself up again.
I ran task manager and could only see Firefox and Skype, as I'd expect. I had no scheduled stuff running.
I updated AVG (free) and gave that a full scan - it found nothing. I did the same with Super anti Spyware - it found just tracking cookies. They'd both been run in the previous week.
Can anyone explain what's going on please, or should I be looking for something malicious embedded deeper?
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you may have wake up enabled. It can be set to wake up by mouse movement, wake up by lan, wake up by keyboard, wake on set time.....
Lots of ways to wake a PC put to sleep, none of them virus related.
And dont put your PC in sleep mode as "usual" You end up with a load of memory leaked away, and a slow PC. If its finished with for the night, turn it off.
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Can't be of direct help, but I had that problem. Cured it so long ago that I can't remember the detail of what I did.
However by researching, there are a number of things that can wake a computer from sleep mode. There is a log file somewhere of system events, and on mine, the mouse or mouse driver was waking it up. So I disabled the mouse from waking the PC and now only the keyboard actions will wake.
This "waking up pc sleep mode" seems a reasonable bit of googling to go on with.
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Thanks for those replies, I guess it's no great problem.
I'm curious about Zeddo's statement 'dont put your PC in sleep mode as "usual" You end up with a load of memory leaked away'
Where does it go, in the gaps between the old Epson printers up in the loft?
I use sleep mode as it powers down quicker and powers back up quicker, I don't have to wait while it 're-opens last browsing session'.
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What Zero is alluding to is applications (and the operating system, device drivers, etc.) are never without bugs and programming issues. Overtime they 'leak memory' which means the code is grabbing memory (being allocated RAM for use) but never release all of it - hence the term leaking. Overtime the system is running low on memory and will have performance issues.
Because the errant processes have grabbed memory and haven't released it properly nothing else gets to use it either. A reboot is the only real option.
Like you I too rely on sleep because the computer is never really totally off - the RAM is being powered so when it is turned on it carries on from where you left off. Saves booting etc. But every so often I will restart the computer to avoid problems that Zero mentions.
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>> I use sleep mode as it powers down quicker and powers back up quicker,
I prefer to put mine into hybernation mode than sleep mode as you have to physically press the power on button to wake it up again, rather than it being turned back on with a mouse movement, accidental keyboard press, etc.
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Overnight - power down.
During day, sleep mode when I'm not using it. But as mentioned above, a mouse movement no longer turns my PC on.
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I'm not enough of a techie to explain the memory thing but Zero's advice matches my experience.
Admittedly my PC is old, a 2006 Futisu Siements Amilo running XP. If it hibernates it's very slow to restart, pages so slow to refersh that Chrome prompts me to kill them etc. If it's fully powered off it restarts reasonably quickly.
It's getting to end of it's useful and I'm tempted to replace it before Win 8 totally dominates.
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Ah yes, I'd forgotten that XP was a little cavalier with its garbage collection. 7 is infinitely superior in reclaiming "orphaned" memory and the requirement for signed, QA-assured drivers in the 64-bit versions has eliminated most of the ill-behaved crud in that department that used to get foisted on XP.
XP needed "de-crufting" on a fairly regular basis, 7 doesn't.
Can't sleep mine anyway, unless I pull a GPU and run with only the one. There was a motherboard BIOS version that this did work with, but that had so many other issues I can't revert to it.
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>> Ah yes, I'd forgotten that XP was a little cavalier with its garbage collection. 7
>> is infinitely superior in reclaiming "orphaned" memory and the requirement for signed, QA-assured drivers in
>> the 64-bit versions has eliminated most of the ill-behaved crud in that department that used
>> to get foisted on XP.
>>
>> XP needed "de-crufting" on a fairly regular basis, 7 doesn't.
Oh it does, there is still lots of 32 bit crud floating around, and its still not that good at reclaiming orphaned memory, driven by the fact that MS assumes that people have enough memory not to worry about it.
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PC in sleep mode started itself - Zero
