Why does my Vostro 1400 turn on in the middle of the night?

I usually leave my laptop on a desk not far from my bed. Nearly every night lately (perhaps every night and I just don't always wake up) my laptop wakes up from sleep mode...I usually hear that Windows boot-up tone or sometimes it's the spinning of the hard-drive or disc drive if I've left a CD in that wakes me up.

Does this suggest a serious virus or trojan? Could it be a BIOS issue? I know nobody can answer for sure, but I'm curious how people would got about addressing this. Welcoming all suggestions. I can't recall any other notably unusual probelms in my day-to-day use though there have been a few instances lately when programs (including Word) would not open and I had to restart the computer.

I suspect this is not a Dell issue per se, but I wanted to post here first...I hope I don't irritate the forum moderators if I later post this in another section....

 

Does it turn on, or does it wake up?

If it is turning on, check your BIOS, there is a setting for your laptop to turn on a specific times.

If it wakes up from standby, you probably have Wake On LAN enabled, which causes the system to wake up when there is activity on your ethernet port.

 

It does not turn on from an off mode. It wakes up from standby. Whenever I'm done using my 1400 I simply close the lid and it slips into standby/sleep. When it turns on at night, you can see the screen is lit up even though the laptop lid is closed.

Does this latter scenario of waking from standby suggest a virus or trojan then? What do you mean by "activity"? My ethernet port is never plugged in, as I use WIFI (though I don't know if that means there'd be no activity on my port).

 

If you got USB devices plugged in they could be the cause of your laptop waking up. I don't know if a virus/trojan could bring the system up from stand by cause even if the memory is turned on the processor isn't, so i'm not sure about that

 

No USB devices.

 

Anybody else?

 

Does it always happen at the same time? Is your system set to check for updates, run a scan, defrag, etc... at that time? Left mine on in sleep mode the other night and it istalled an update, however don't know if the screen lit up.

 

Go to Device Manager, double click your wireless adaptor under Network Adaptors to open the properties, Power Management tab and uncheck "Allow this device to wake this computer", apply and OK out.

See if that stops it.