Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by criddell 1022 days ago
Windows can wake itself from hibernate.

Killing all of the wake timers and editing specific keys in the registry will usually fix this, but it's messy and not something typical users are comfortable doing.

4 comments

This. During lockdowns, I dusted off an old PC and set it up with windows for gaming. The computer was in front of my bed. One out of two nights, the thing would randomly wake out of hibernation, blasting the freaking blue bitlocker screen at me (password unlock, since that PC didn't have a tpm).

This PC was kept reasonably up to date, too (usually installed whatever update at the most a day or two after they came out, complete with the reboot), so not sure what it was hoping to do, exactly.

>One out of two nights, the thing would randomly wake out of hibernation

I'm sure you mistakenly used sleep instead of hibernate without knowing or remembering, to have that issue, or you had the issue where hibernate didn't work and reverted to sleep instead.

I also had that issue and discovered that the Linux dual-boot installation with Grub's changes to the MBR broke Window's capability to hibernate, so me hitting hibernate was actually triggering sleep instead.

Hibernate does not randomly wake up.

On Windows, hibernate is a sleep state.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/k...

Here’s an example of a Windows machine waking from hibernate and how it was fixed:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/707115/windows-10-...

These kinds of problems are not uncommon and are not always due to users confusing the different sleep states.

Right, I have the same problem with my PC, guess I'll look for those hacks.
> Windows can wake itself from hibernate.

The USB bus and sound system is still the weak spot on a windows computer in my experience, this website, reddit, youtube, or dailymail generally takes them out.

Surprised that people used sleep and hibernate, considering TSR's were invented in the dos days and the browser can do lots of fancy stuff.

Theres even a reg setting to clear the page file on shutdown.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\ ClearPageFileAtShutdown Dword32 1

>Windows can wake itself from hibernate.

You're confusing that with sleep. Windows can't wake itself from hibernate as the machine is fully powered off, not in some sleep state.

No, he's right. Windows can wake the computer from total shut down even (S5). It uses RTC alarms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_clock_alarm
"Can be set to wake up" doesn't mean "will wake up".
Modern versions wake up out of the box, you need to tinker with them to stop that.
What do you mean? Hibernate works out of the box. There nothing to "fix" in the registry for that to work.
He means Windows can set a timer to wake up after a while to run scheduled tasks. You might not have noticed those wake timers because they are few and it usually works as expected with windows hibernating back after a few minutes.

The difficulty of disabling wake timers has been exaggerated, though. It's in the advanced power settings, there's no need for the big scary registry.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/63070-enable-disable-wak...

>He means Windows can set a timer to wake up after a while to run scheduled tasks.

Yes, it can se timer to wake automatically from hibernate, but that doesn't mean it does that automatically withotu you setting those timers. I can understand there have been some bugs in the past but that's anon-issue today.

There are supposedly fixes for it to stay hibernating.

The issue isn't that it doesn't go to sleep. It's that it doesn't stay asleep.

In hibernate the laptop stays powered off and nothing is running, you can even pull the power cord. It can't wake up from that. It will only wake up when you power it back on, not by itself. The wake up issues are for sleep mode, not hibernate where the CPU is completely off and unpowered.