How to determine what network activity is preventing sleep?

So after DAAAYS of troubleshooting, i did what i should have done first.

Disabled my ethernet adapter. PC will now sleep. (it would sleep fine manually, but wouldnt go to sleep on its own).

I thought it was my nvidia shieldtv's doing something over the network that kept it awake, but i turned those both off and the pc still will only sleep when i disable the network adapter.

Turning off "allow this device to wake the computer" would be a workaround, except I need Wake on Lan to function so thats no bueno.

Plus this was never an issue until the last month or so. Something has changed.

Anybody able to point me in the right direction?

What happens if you ask your device?

Open a CMD or PowerShell prompt and enter: powercfg -lastwake

My PC has no wake timers/wake from mouse or keyboard/WOL, etc. so I get a null result:


What (if anything) does yours show?

(Note: You’re only querying, not changing, so it doesn’t have to be an elevated prompt.)

Hope this helps…

i get the same result. as it doesnt wake when i put it to sleep. It just doesnt sleep on its own unless I disable the nic. ty for the reply :)

its like it doesnt even attempt to. monitors go off, and it just hangs out ><

worth mentioning - if i disable the nic, and use wifi instead - result is the same. If i use wifi but use my phone as a hotspot, it will sleep.

this point to anything in particular?

Open a CMD or PowerShell prompt and enter: powercfg -requests
(Note: This will have to be an elevated prompt, even though you are just querying.)

The results should show all requests preventing your PC from entering a sleep state.

been through all the easy stuff my friend

dead blank. None across the board.

Its some type of network traffic. Has me at wits end. I have 2 other pc's right next to it, connected to the same network that both sleep fine. grr

ok NOW im a little closer.

I disabled ALL my network shares, and it went to sleep. Unfortunately - disabling network shares is a fail since this pc is the main pc.

how does one get it to sleep irrespective of network shares?

found this on another forum from way back when (with no solution given) that is a different OS but describes the same exact problem with what sounds like a plausible explanation as when I ended the shared drives, it said id be booting 1 user, which would likely have been the pc next to me.

Heres the post

"Looking more into Server 2003, it looks like there is a Session being created when my Windows 7 computer connects via mapped network that doesn't get closed when not being used"

So how can one force the session(s) to terminate when not being used?