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Win8 computer wakes up by itself

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One night I'm working at my desk with my computer off. Suddenly my computer turns itself on. I've disabled mouse and keyboard inputs from waking it up. The only thing that should wake it from sleep is when I press the power button. Luckily there is a command that can tell you what woke your computer up. Open a command prompt and type "powercfg -lastwake". Here's what I saw:

 C:\Users\Dustin>powercfg -lastwake
Wake History Count - 1
Wake History [0]
  Wake Source Count - 1
  Wake Source [0]
    Type: Wake Timer
    Owner: [PROCESS] \Device\HarddiskVolume1\Windows\System32\services.exe
    Owner Supplied Reason: Windows will execute 'NT TASK\Microsoft\Windows\Media Center\mcupdate_scheduled' scheduled task that requested waking the computer.

So apparently I have a scheduled task called mcupdate_scheduled that woke my computer up. Next step, go to the start screen and type "scheduled" and you'll see an application called Scheduled Tasks. The path to the task is listed in the message above: Microsoft -> Windows -> Media Center. Navigate to that in the tree on the left and look for the mcupdate_scheduled task. If you look at the task and go to the Conditions tab you'll see that the "Wake the computer to run this task" checkbox is checked.

Seriously? Who in their infinite wisdom decided that Media Center update was so important that my computer needed to be woken up for it? There's even a KB article for it: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/979878

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 17, 2013
    lol.. 'seriously' thanks.

  • Anonymous
    August 26, 2015
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 01, 2015
    Yip, Dustin and Mike I've gotta agree with you here. Media Centre Update ... of all the things to wake up for. My PC takes forever to  boot from ULPS. And for the life of me,  I couldn't work out why. It was driving me mental. Thanks for the post and the link to the KB. At least I didn't beat up my room mate.

  • Anonymous
    September 10, 2016
    And this is still a thing in Windows 10. Just falling asleep, and suddenly my computer starts making way-too-loud wakeup and notification noises. I forced it to shut off with the Power button in protest. At least, I assume this was my problem - the lastwake command came back blank. But, I followed your solution, and sure enough, it's set to update at 12:03 AM and wake up the computer to do it. So anyway, thanks for this fix, hopefully this stops.