I've built a media centre PC that I'm also using as network storage for other computers. I want it to stay asleep whenever it's not explicitly being used, but it has to be able to wake on LAN when one of the other PCs wants to use it for playback or backup purposes. Unfortunately, based on the event logs, it's waking up a lot more frequently than I'd like, and I don't know why. I'm aiming for a 20:80 split between awake and asleep, as a ballpark figure, but I'm getting about 50:50 right now.
It's mostly happening during waking hours when someone in the house is using one of their computers. I can see from the logs that the PC is awake for about 15 minutes, then goes to sleep due to the power settings (15 minute idle timeout) but it's waking up again almost immediately - usually somewhere between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. I assume that this is because one of the other PCs has polled the local network, waking the media centre up. Occasionally the PC manages to stay asleep for most or all of the night, but not very often.
All of the PCs are running Windows 7. I've set up regular backup jobs on the non-MC PCs, but I've tried to synchronise them all to run at specific times (e.g. 6PM) and relatively infrequently (repeating every 3 hours when the PC is awake) so I'm confident that this is not the culprit. I've also minimised and synchronised the various updates running on the MC so that the ones I've been able to identify only run once a week. I've looked at the Services running on the PC but I don't know what most of them do so I haven't touched them.
According to the event logs, most of the wakeup events are unknown, and about 80% of the unknown wakeups happen after less than five minutes of sleep time. The rest of the wakeups are due to scheduled events (recording TV, Windows Media Centre updates) or someone pressing the power button.
Can anyone suggest any way that I can identify exactly what it is that the other PCs are doing that wakes the media centre PC up so frequently?
Thanks in advance.
It's mostly happening during waking hours when someone in the house is using one of their computers. I can see from the logs that the PC is awake for about 15 minutes, then goes to sleep due to the power settings (15 minute idle timeout) but it's waking up again almost immediately - usually somewhere between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. I assume that this is because one of the other PCs has polled the local network, waking the media centre up. Occasionally the PC manages to stay asleep for most or all of the night, but not very often.
All of the PCs are running Windows 7. I've set up regular backup jobs on the non-MC PCs, but I've tried to synchronise them all to run at specific times (e.g. 6PM) and relatively infrequently (repeating every 3 hours when the PC is awake) so I'm confident that this is not the culprit. I've also minimised and synchronised the various updates running on the MC so that the ones I've been able to identify only run once a week. I've looked at the Services running on the PC but I don't know what most of them do so I haven't touched them.
According to the event logs, most of the wakeup events are unknown, and about 80% of the unknown wakeups happen after less than five minutes of sleep time. The rest of the wakeups are due to scheduled events (recording TV, Windows Media Centre updates) or someone pressing the power button.
Can anyone suggest any way that I can identify exactly what it is that the other PCs are doing that wakes the media centre PC up so frequently?
Thanks in advance.
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