Wake-up doesn't always work

[Dave T.]

When my computer goes to sleep, I can wake it up by pressing a mapped
key on my keyboard. The problem is that sometimes I have to press the
key 5 or 6 times before vista will wake up. This also shows up when it
is time for a scheduled task to take place, such as backup. I scheduled
a wake-up in task scheduler, but sometimes it fails. Can someone clue me
how to trouble-shoot this problem?

Dave T.

 

[MLD]

When my computer goes to sleep, I can wake it up by pressing a mapped key
on my keyboard. The problem is that sometimes I have to press the key 5 or
6 times before vista will wake up. This also shows up when it is time for
a scheduled task to take place, such as backup. I scheduled a wake-up in
task scheduler, but sometimes it fails. Can someone clue me how to
trouble-shoot this problem?

Dave T.

Try holding the key down for several seconds---In my system it's the Space
key (holding for several seconds) that wakes my computer out of sleep.
MLD

 

[Jay Moore]

My Acer laptop has a similar problem. I put it to sleep when i take it
somewhere rather than shutting down or hibernating and when i wake it up
(pressing the power button), the screen will sometimes come on, but then go
off but the power indictor shows it's on, I enter the password and it'll
generally wake right back up. I've yet to find a fix for this.

 

[Dave T.]

Try holding the key down for several seconds---In my system it's the
Space key (holding for several seconds) that wakes my computer out of
sleep.
MLD

Thanks MLD, that does seem to work, but it doesn't solve the problem
with the scheduled wake-up. I have task scheduler set to try the wake-up
once per minute for 20 minutes. It works occasionally, but fails more
often than that.
Dave

 

[Dave T.]

When my computer goes to sleep, I can wake it up by pressing a mapped
key on my keyboard. The problem is that sometimes I have to press the
key 5 or 6 times before vista will wake up. This also shows up when it
is time for a scheduled task to take place, such as backup. I scheduled
a wake-up in task scheduler, but sometimes it fails. Can someone clue me
how to trouble-shoot this problem?

Dave T.

Thanks for the replies, I have found the solution to my problem after
several days of searching:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929463/en-us

It turns out that task scheduler will not wake up the computer when the
task is created in the "Create basic task" mode. The task must be
created in the "Create task" mode. (Huh?) The creation in EITHER mode is
identical in every respect. Same dialog boxes, everything. The only
difference is that one will awake the computer from sleep, the other
will not even though you can specify the wake up in either mode.

IMHO, this is a perfect example of the wrong-headed over-engineering of
an application and under-engineering of the help files that Microsoft is
famous for.