This was the LAMEST thing I’ve run into as of yet in Vista. I installed Vista Ultimate on my new E6850 proc + DP35DP motherboard and for the most part it was running as flawlessly as on the E6600 with the 965OT motherboard I had previously (simply swapped mb+proc). The thing I loved most was sleep mode. Sleep in vista rocks when your devices support it – which mine do.  I can sleep and wake from S3 sleep mode for weeks without a reboot. I loved it. But on the new motherboard/proc I was having a colossally annoying problem. Every day around 10am, my machine would turn on by itself from sleep mode. I’d put the machine to sleep at night, then while I was at work it would wake up and I’d come home to it sitting there on. Wasting power is one thing, but if I left my outlook open, it would automatically download my email and gmail would move new messages so I wouldn’t get notifications of new mail at work. Annoying. But what came next was even more annoying.

I file a help request on the Microsoft tech help site and he gave me some good advice on trying to find out what service was starting my machine. I updated the bios, made sure there were no power-on-lan events going in bios/net driver, etc. The event logs list tons of startup events every time the power comes on. Lan drivers get IP addresses, sound cards initialize, about a dozen services kick off – there was almost no way to know what started the chain of events since they would start in different orders each time. You can normally see what turned your machine on by using:

powercfg -lastwake

but when I ran it – it listed NO EVENT as having woke the machine. Nada – zip. It just magically was awake. If I used my mouse/keyboard, it would list that.  So, I tried using

taskschd.msc

And finding all events running at 10am, but you know what – there is NO way to list events by time – you must dig through all the dialogs for each service to find the start times for each event. And then you have the joy of events that run “Every X hours from first run”, or “Runs when event X happens” – so you have little idea when they’ll run next (outside of looking up in the log when they ran last, etc). It was a royal pain.

I finally found some guys here that were having similar trouble and traced it back to Windows Media player and having a TV tuner card installed (which I have one). It turns out the ehSched service will run to get the latest tv channel listings if you set that up in windows media player. Well, the service doesn’t say when it runs – and the event to trigger isn’t listed anywhere I could find it.  My guess is since it’s a service, not a scheduled task. Some folks had this think kicking their PC on at 3am and waking them up. There was no way in Media center of turning off the auto tv program guide getter after you turned in on.  That was annoying – so I figured some registery hacking was in order.  Turns out – it uses a complex formula that must be decyphered to get the wake/service run time. I JOKE YOU NOT. Look at this thing:

Media Center stores the last time the download ran and the next time it will run in the registry.
The 2 entries in the registry that contain these values are respectively:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionMedia CenterServiceEPGdlLastTime
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionMedia CenterServiceEPGdlRegTime

The value is dllasttime is a6 4f 6c b6 70 dd c4 01, so enter 1c4dd70b66c4fa6 into the calculator. Click decimal and you will get 127470165639843750. At the command prompt run w32tm /ntte 127470165639843750 and you will get:

C:Documents and SettingsUserName>w32tm /ntte 127470165639843
147534 21:56:03.9843750 – 12/8/2004 14:56:03 (local time)

NUTS! Anyway, the guys on the forum wrote up a program to decypher then change the start time – but many found that it would drift after a few days and end up waking you up at 3am again. So, I went in to services.msc and disabled the service. But it didn’t work the first day.  I looked again, and thanks to the new features of vista – there are now retry events associated with your services.

So, to shut this off you must:

1. Start services.msc at the command prompt
2. Scroll down to “Windows Media Center Scheduler Service”
3. Select that service, and in the “General” tab, stop the service, and set the startup type to “disabled”
4. Then, select the “Recovery” tab, and for first, second, and subsequent failures, select “Take No Action”

Now my machine stays asleep all day. Thanks Windows Vista – for making my life easier!