The ghosts want to use the internet?

[Josquius]

Often when I go to bed I do not shut down my computer, I simply put it into hibernate. Apparently this saves the vast majority of the power it being off does and means you don't need the big power up power surge and...ah...who am I kidding. Waiting forever for the computer to boot up sucks, its good to have it ready to go in a few seconds.

Sometimes however...I wake up in the morning and it is on.
I've always just put this down to me doing stuff in my sleep. Maybe I accidentally knock the keyboard or somesuch and turn it on.
But just now...I was lying in bed, awake and unable to sleep, unmoving...and suddenly I hear my computer activating. Sure enough it has woken itself up from hibernation.

Now...just WTF?
Any ideas why this could possibly be happening? Its windows 7 and...yeah. I've no idea what it could be. Googling around I find a guy who had this problem much more frequently than me and it was because of a virus checker that I do not have. I've no idea what did it for me.

[viper37]

It could be many things.

It could be a power outage, and your computer restart.

Or it's something waking up your computer...  Wich, if you look in the BIOS, IRRC, could be activity on the LAN or the modem or some USB port.
If it's LAN activity waking it up, maybe you have some software with bi-directional communication and something is poking your computer, waking it up.

Or it could be a trojan horse.

But I'd start with the BIOS and disable "wake up by..." everything but the keyboard.

[DontSayBanana]

Some scheduled tasks in Windows have access to "wake" a computer.  I deliberately use this, myself: I work on my computer most of the day, so I hibernate it when I go to bed, and I have it set to wake and restart at the same time as my alarm in the morning.  You should check the tasks in task scheduler under the "conditions" tab to make sure none have "wake the computer to run this task" selected.

[Josquius]

Thought I'd fixed it and it does it again losing my some work

[Slargos]

My computer does that at irregular intervals aswell.

I'm beginning to suspect a trojan.

[Agelastus]

Windows update will automatically reboot your computer as neccessary unless you disable some of its' functions*. Could that be your problem?


*Discovered after leaving a laptop on overnight to download some bittorrents and waking up to face the log-in screen.

[Cerr]

This started happening to my PC a few days ago.
Not sure what was causing it to wake up from sleep after about 20 minutes.

Managed to fix it by going to Advanced Settings in Power options, sleep -> Allow wake times and setting that to disabled.