Industrial said:
So I leave the comp on overnight to complete a task that finishes in
two hours but wake up to find the computer still running and the task
long-done. Is there a way to figure out what is duping the hibernate
feature to think that shit is still running in the background?
What triggers a hibernate to happen anyway? Write activity on the disk?
Generally, you have a Power Options control panel.
It has a series of Power schemes.
And down near the bottom, are some settings while that
Power scheme is being used.
On a laptop, the policies may also depend on whether
the computer is running on battery, or from AC.
I would expect the measure of "inactivity", to be
input inactivity. Like, no mouse movement or no
keyboard input. If the mouse is shaken by local vibration,
that might be enough to fake some input.
A standby or hibernate cannot happen, if they're "blocked".
If, for some reason, a driver or some hardware claims
not to support that ACPI state, an attempt by Windows
to enter that state may fail. The computer then sits there.
You would hope though, in that case, that the affected
states are grayed out in the panel.
Other possibilities include - the computer attempted to
hibernate, and something work it up immediately. That
can happen, if a network interface is set to "wake on
activity" (i.e. not even magic packet, just wake on
any packet). The computer then won't stay in the new
state for very long at all.
Another possibility, is the machine attempts to hibernate,
crashes, and does an automatic reboot. It could continue
to do that, over and over again, until you find it the
next morning, awake and waiting for its next hibernate
attempt.
Try setting the hibernate interval to 1 minute, and see what
happens. Watch closely, to see if it attempts to hibernate,
or just does... nothing. You can look in Event Viewer for
some evidence, taking note of the current time, so you can
find the time stamp of an interesting event.
Paul
