Scheduled task not waking computer

Question

I have a scheduled task which backs up my local drive to a NAS drive. It is set to run each evening at 22:30, wake the computer if necessary, and is run with the highest priorities.

The problem is that it does not always wake the laptop to run the job. Some times it starts at the scheduled time, other times it starts randomly overnight. At other times it starts when I wake the laptop the following morning.

Although I have had the same issue before on other laptops, this time the job is running on a new Windows 11 Pro machine. The job was setup from scratch, not imported from the old laptop.

Answer 1

Hello Dave. Two things to check:

1. Check for Wake Events in Event Viewer

• Open Event Viewer → Windows Logs → System.
• Filter the log by these sources: Power-Troubleshooter, Kernel-Power, and TaskScheduler.
• Look for entries around 22:30 and overnight that mention things like:
  • "A wake timer was set/ignored"
  • "The system woke unexpectedly" or "failed to resume"

If your scheduled task wakes the PC late or only after manual wake, you’ll likely spot a missed or suppressed wake timer here.

2. Verify Task Scheduler Settings

• Open Task Scheduler, find your task, and open its Properties.
• On the Conditions tab, confirm “Wake the computer to run this task” is checked.
• On the Settings tab, ensure “Run task as soon as possible after a scheduled start is missed” is enabled. Without this, the task won’t run until the next trigger if it misses its scheduled time.

Let me know what you find on these two.

Answer 2

Thanks Emmanuel.

There were no suspect events at or around 22:30..

I did not have the 'Run task as soon ...' option set. I have done so now. But I'm not sure this will be affective - as I noted earlier, after failing to run at 22:30 the task does sometimes start randomly overnight.

Answer 3

Hi Dave Cope,
Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum. I'm happy to help.

Please ensure that you have enabled Allow wake timers.

Open Power Options > Change plan settings for the current power plan > Change advanced power settings > expand Sleep > expand Allow wake timers > set it to Enable.

Or you can make an alternative method by enabling wake timer on your BIOS to wake the computer from power off stage, if your BIOS supports such feature.

I hope that above information is helpful to you.

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