Computer Will Not Go to Sleep or Stay Asleep

Computers and proper sleep have been the bane of my existence for years.

Sleep issues prove extra difficult to diagnose, in spite of hours and hours of research, because you have to wait and see what happens.

I am an experienced builder, and a relatively competent user/administrator. I'm asking for one particular computer, one I built myself, but it may bear mentioning that it seems like all computers I touch have sleep issues, even in different locations. Those are separate issues though.

• The computer in question for this post will go to sleep if told to sleep after 15 minutes or less, meaning if I set it to sleep after an hour, it is 99% assured it will never go to sleep.
• Even though it sleeps with a 15 minute or less timer, it will eventually wake up all on its own, even with the wireless keyboard and mouse physically turned off (not themselves just asleep).
• There are two displays connected as well as wired ethernet and no external USB hubs.
• Sometimes there is an Oculus Rift setup connected, but the sleep behaviors are the same if it is connected or not.
• There is very little software actually installed at all on the computer. Its duties are games/VR, and then just browsing.

I understand that it should be considered that I should just turn it off and on when I need it, but it's my personal preference that it be in "shallow" sleep to be back up in an instant.

I have read about sleep timers and believe them to be disabled. I have also read about the command line command to see the last wake event and it never displays any event ever. Perhaps unusually, Event Viewer is so clogged with "events" my fairly up to date computer can barely cope with it, and when sorting for Power issues, there is rarely anything even coinciding with the times the computer is waking up. Maybe I don't know what it is I'm supposed to be searching for.

A related wrinkle in the configuration is that I use the free tier of TeamViewer for remote access. It is my desire that the computer also sleep, but properly Wake on LAN to remote into. This may be problematic to sleep, although from what I've read it SHOULD work out fine.

Thanks for taking the time to read over this post. I'm hoping to arrive at a solution and hope providing as many details as I can will help.

Thanks for your quick reply. I will double check the Scheduled Tasks and get back to you. I can't access the system just now because I turned it off so I can't remote into it.

A scheduled task, I would assume, would explain one wake, but wouldn't explain why it wakes and doesn't ever go back to sleep. Unless it is continually sleeping and waking. I do not have the patience, obviously, to monitor it for hours and hours to see it's complete behavior.

Scheduled Tasks were numerous, and all seemed to be fairly standard fair, Adobe Updater, Dropbox, some nVidia things. A few things had schedules and a couple had some kind of repetition - throwing some caution to the wind I edited most of the tasks to only run when a user was logged in, as opposed to at a System level, where it seemed they would run themselves at will.

After doing this, I used the computer for a few minutes and manually put it to sleep. It woke up INSTANTLY. Vexed, I checked the Event Viewer and it seemed as though the Oculus software had woken it up. I killed the Oculus software and put it back to sleep. And I waited. And after about two minutes it woke back up. Again, it appeared to be a piece of Oculus software, and I killed off every Oculus thread I could. And I repeated. It woke up again after about three minutes or so, this time citing that the Killer Ethernet card had woken the system. No more specific reason cited. Beyond fed up, I just shut it down.

It's just beyond me that the computer can't just sleep. Microsoft's live support checked a few things, but then gently suggested subscribing to their support for 150 dollars, which is outside my budget and also a bit nuts, and I have little faith they would even be able to help sufficiently at a full paid tier.

Sigh. The computer is sleeping fairly normally now. I can't even be happy because I don't have a firm understanding of why, or how to get back to this corrected state in the future if things go awry again.

I did get the Fall Creator's Update to Windows 10. It's hard to assume that was the fix I needed... anyway, Thanks.

Only sat by while the Fall Creator's Update ran itself.