Thanks to one of the contributors here, I was able to resolve this problem.  Unfortunately, I could not determine the criminal software responsible for waking my PC every 2 hours, but I'm happy to have found a way to defeat it anyway.  Essentially, I used powercfg to set Vista so it does not allow auto-wakes from S3 standby.  I have absolutely no reason to come out of standby unless I hit the keyboard, so this is fine by me.  Probably would not be much of a fix for many of you MCE users.  In any case, everything else I tried failed to help, but this fix worked!

Can you give a little more info on this?  I'm dealing with basicailly the same situations, but from hiberantion.  My powercfg -devicequery wake_from_any shows a hand full of devices (like keybaord, mouse, sd) network, PCI Express root port, and three umbus enumerators.  I don't see the real time clock listed here.

I tried to disabled wake from "System CMOS/real time clock", but powercfg returns "you don't have permissions to enable or disable device wake".  Yes, I'm running from an Admin Command prompt and UAC is disabled, anyways.

I'm SOOOOO tired of my notebook battery being dead that I've started pulling the batter to prevent it from waking. Just like you, I'm fine with only ME being able to wake it up.

If you do this, your computer will not auto-wake for any reason (s/w reason - I suppose WOL etc. will still work).  This info was given to me by another poster here on the Green Button:

1. Open a CMD prompt
2. powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_sleep bd3b718a-0680-4d9d-8ab2-e1d2b4ac806d 0
3. powercfg -setdcvalueindex scheme_current sub_sleep bd3b718a-0680-4d9d-8ab2-e1d2b4ac806d 0
4. powercfg -setactive scheme_current

This changes and applies a new power scheme that stops the machine from being woken from sleep. In my case, I have a desktop system and probably didn't need to set the DC option, but I did both anyway.

An interesting fix, but it means that it won't wake to make Scheduled Recordings - which I would really like it to do.

It's guaranteed to be the TV pack, since I have three Vista machines in the house - one laptop, the Media Center, and my desktop development machine I use to write Media Center software.

I have installed the TV pack on the notebook and Media Center machines...and only those two machines are experiencing wakeups.

It's INCREDIBLY irritating for the laptop, which was a virtually clean installation of Windows, because of course it's devestating to the battery life. It appears to have two wakeup points, one at 4:00 in the morning and another at roughly 11:00 in the day.

I have set ALL of my hardware to not be able to wake the computer, and I don't believe there are any scheduled tasks left with the ability to wake the machine either. The actual cause for the wakeup is 'unknown' according to the event log and power configuration program.

Two completely different motherboard configurations, one is an AMD X64 X2 (ASUS motherboard), one is an Intel Core 2 Duo (ACER). Both are connected wirelessly to the internet, but the wireless card does not have the ability to wake the machine. Wake On Lan is also disabled. I've changed the update times for Media Center to occur only during the day (12-12), but the darn thing continues to wake up if left overnight.

I love everything else about the TV pack...but this wakeup issue is insane.

I'm not so sure it is solely down to TV Pack.

My desktop system has a recent install of Vista Home Premium 64bit, no TV Pack. I do have a tuner card in it but do not use it - usually. This system would go to sleep and stay asleep with out any problem, then it started waking up. I'd come home from work and find it on, I'll get up in the morning and find it on. I remembered that I had setup media center and used it to record a program at the weekend and since then it had this random waking up, doing a system restore to a point prior to the weekend cured the problem and it's been 100% reliable since.

On the otherhand, my media centre system has TV Pack on it and does have a habit wakeing up and not going back to sleep, but sometime it will be fine for a week or more. Whilst this doesn't cause me a problem as it's in the lounge, it does annoy me as it's a waste of electricity.

What would be very usefull is if we had some way of seeing what time the RTC was set to wake up next and change it, I mean that must be possible?

My PC wakes up at 3:00 AM too, so I'm going to change the hour though the reg key, good to know.

The problem is that it doesn't return to standby after that wake (if my mind doesn't trick me, before the tv pack it woke up to record the program, then went to sleep again).

Do I miss something? Does anyone have the same issue?

Thanks.

Yes I have the same issue, it wakes up and does not go back to sleep again, it done this pre TV Pack as well. If it wakes up to record something it will go back to sleep though.

while troubleshooting a guide indexing problem I stumbled across something that I'm not sure was raised before.
If you type task into the start menu and drill down to microsoft-windows-media center
amongst a whole pile of other very interesting stuff in here there's an entry called
mcupdate_scheduled
which is set to run daily and another called
ehDRMInit
(we can all guess what thats responsible for) which seems to run daily.

It's possible, but tricky, to work out which process has created a timer that will wake the computer and what time it will happen, but I don't know if there's a way to do it after the event.

To see what timers are set you can use the "!timer" command in a live kernel debug session in the windbg debugger. If there are timers set to wake the machine you'll see entries like this at the bottom of the output:

Wakeable timers:
8913c040      1cb25452 002f1f90 [ 1/ 4/2051 11:59:57.790]

It's then possible to use the "!handle" command to see which process has a handle open on that timer and hence is the one that set it.

Note that you need to configure Vista for kernel debugging to be enabled ("bcdedit -debug on") - it's best to use a different boot menu entry for it. You shouldn't run with debug enabled longer than necessary, and need to be sure of what you're doing.

Microsoft should really make it easy for users to see this - a list of what wakeable timers are set and which process created them and a way to see which process created the timer that woke a machine would be good.

Hi rolyapples

This is a very, very interesting info. I spent quite some time trying to find out if there were a way to list timers but could not. Do you have a link to more details on the !timer command in windbg?

As you said, MS should *really* make it easier for users to see this.

Fyi, my TV Pack wake up issue has been solved by:

1. using the magic registry key documented in this thread (to avoid the 3am wake-up)

2. making sure that a tv show is recorded each evening (to avoid the last show+12hours wake up)

Sincerely,

-G

gartaud:

Do you have a link to more details on the !timer command in windbg?

The documentation for the command is here, but it doesn't tell you much about it really. The interesting part of the output of the command is the "Wakeable timers" section at the end - this should show all the timers that have been set to wake the system (set using the SetWaitableTimer function with the resume flag set to true). The hex number under the timer heading in the output is the address of the timer.

You can then use the "!handle" command in windbg to get a list of all the open handles for all processes - if you search through that list you should find an entry with the address for the timer and can therefore workout which process created the timer.

Alternatively, you can use the Sysinternals Process Explorer tool to look through all the processes to see which have timer handles open and whether the address matches the address of the wakeable timer. You need to enable the Show Unnamed Handles and Mappings option to see all the handles in the lower pane in Process Explorer, and you can add the Object Address column to the output to see the address for  the handle.

 

Pino:

I tested this and there were no more wakeups at night.

I created a bat file like this:

Net stop ehrecvr
Net stop ehsched

TASKKILL /F /PID ehrecvr.exe
TASKKILL /F /PID ehsched.exe

and called it StopServices.

I have MCE standbytool running and you can stop the services and killing the processes with it by placing the bat file in the windows folder and insert the following in the registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Herman van Eijk\MceStandbyTool]

"RunAtSuspend"="C:\\Windows\\StopServices.bat"

 

If you do this the processes and services will be killed each time the pc goes to standby.

 

I think there is another problem with the TV Pack Update!

I just found out that my pc's won't come out of standby for scheduled recordings.

I have a Vista Ultimate running as a server with 4 tv tuner cards so this one doesn't need te wake from standby for scheduled recordings. But I have one pc with only one TV tuner card and I scheduled a recording and it never woke up for recording so I tested this on the Server PC and this one also didn't wake up.

So I started finding out what caused it by uninstalling the latest windows security updates and hotfixes but still no wake up for scheduled recordings.

So my guess is this must be a "bug" in TV Pack update.

Can anyone confirm this or has an idea what caused it?

 

So I had "useless" wakeups in the middle of the night but when it needs to wake up it won't!

 

 

I´m in the same boat here.

Have you found out what causes the pc not to wake to record ?

Also, your bat file, does it prevent the scheduled recordings from taking place ?

Yes the batch file causes the pc not to wake up from standby for recordings.

When the services are not active it won't wake up.

You need to change the time for sceduled update in the registry.

Put these settings in the registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\BackgroundScanner]
"PeriodicScanEnabled"=dword:00000011

I have the same problem.

New Vista laptop wakes at 3:00 AM, 4:09 AM, 16:09 PM.

I'm also sure the problem started to happen after TV Pack. I've checked all system logs and they started the exact day I installed the TV Pack. No wake ups the days before.

I really hope for a urgent TV Pack update from MS.

A fix would indeed be very nice but in the mean time you might want to know that:

1. the key provided by Mike Hayton in a previous post does let you change the 3:00 am call to some other time. Look for the following key earlier in this thread:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\BackgroundScanner\PeriodicScan

2. you probably recorded something around 16:09 at one point and that is why you will get a call every 12 hours from this seed time. Recording something else at another time will change the seed time.