How to tell if computer is waking while it is supposed to be in sleep mode?

I've got an M1530 with vista home premium 32 bit, 8600m gt, T7500, the 200 gig 7200rpm drive, and 4 gigs of ram. When I put the computer to sleep, I've noticed that while unplugged it is using about 10% of its battery charge per hour, which is a good amount considering I have the larger 9 cell battery and I've read that most laptops are supposed to use about 2-3% of their charge per hour while in sleep mode. I've also read that this could be caused by a program running that causes the computer to wake occasionally from its sleep, or perhaps by video drivers. I'm using the modded 174.74 drivers from laptopvideo2go, and I leave the wireless switched on while the computer sleeps. The only programs I leave running are rocketdock and my windows sidebar, which has a gmail checker... could that be the culprit? Any ideas? I want to be able to leave my computer sleeping all day and still have a usable charge when I pick it up.

 

I suspect you'd be better off in the Dell forum with this query.
It may be model specific.

My Sony Vaio SZ loses about 5% per hour on sleep...
Just as a comparison...

 

Well, I asked in the dell forum and there wasn't much response, so I thought I'd try here as well... An update- I've noticed that when I leave it in sleep mode, about every 5 minutes it makes the noises it makes when I turn it on, the little whirring and clicking noise from the DVD drive, and then it stops. Clearly it is waking itself from sleep every 5 minutes and then returning to that state, but how do I figure out what is causing this?

 

Event logs - but I'm the wrong person to help you with these.

 

yup, check the event logs. If Windows updates are scheduled for 3AM in windows vista, your computer will wake at 3AM to check for and download updates. It's been a frustrating topic for many.

 

I think I found the culprit, every 5 minutes while my computer is supposed to be asleep it shows this event-
Log Name: System
Source: Microsoft-Windows-Dhcp-Client
Date: 11/30/2008 8:26:18 AM
Event ID: 1003
Task Category: None
Level: Warning
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: Dan-Lappy
Description:
Your computer was not able to renew its address from the network (from the DHCP Server) for the Network Card with network address 001DE0734F51. The following error occurred:
The operation was canceled by the user.. Your computer will continue to try and obtain an address on its own from the network address (DHCP) server.
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
<System>
<Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-Dhcp-Client" Guid='{15A7A4F8-0072-4EAB-ABAD-F98A4D666AED}' EventSourceName="Dhcp" />
<EventID Qualifiers="0">1003</EventID>
<Version>0</Version>
<Level>3</Level>
<Task>0</Task>
<Opcode>0</Opcode>
<Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2008-11-30T13:26:18.000Z" />
<EventRecordID>502856</EventRecordID>
<Correlation />
<Execution Processid='0' Threadid='0' />
<Channel>System</Channel>
<Computer>Dan-Lappy</Computer>
<Security />
</System>
<EventData>
<Data>001DE0734F51</Data>
<Data>%%1223</Data>
</EventData>
</Event>

Is there a way to prevent this? I think it happens even with the wireless turned off, though I'll double check, and I also made sure I unchecked the box that allows the network adapter to wake the computer from sleep...

 

Possibly some obscure setting...
Are oyu using an "odd" network connection? Domain name etc. ?

 

Don't think so, and it happens on whatever wireless network I've been on... at home, at my brother's, at work, anywhere...

 

ok... network experts?

 

Well, I've been playing around some more and I think I've determined that it is a trojan or a virus that is sending information out, I've finally gotten around to doing a virus scan and it found a bunch of things, I've deleted some of them and now my firefox has stopped working and when I restart I get lots of windows errors when I get to my desktop, so I guess i'll have to keep cleaning things up or go for a windows re-install... thanks for the help detlev

 

In terms of the original question regarding battery usage while in sleep - keeping the NIC live will use up a lot more battery than turning it off, particularly if you also have the NIC's power level set to high.

Is there any reason for leaving the NIC turned on when the rest of the system is asleep?

 

You're welcome
Best of luck cleaning your laptop!

Virus - I dare say that I'm lucky enough to have not yet caught one.

 

That seems like an indication that the DHCP server that is supplying you with a TCP/IP address has set the time of the lease to only five minutes. That is just a little short. The only way you can fix that is to adjust the DHCP server's settings to provide you with a longer lease time.

Having said that, I am not sure why the OS should wake from sleep just to service an expired DHCP lease.

Gary

 

The NIC is most likely what's waking the system up. I don't know what specific NIC or LAN controller you have in your system; however, Intel has built into some of its LAN controllers the ability to issue a "Power Management Event" signal (i.e., it can wake the system up) on the basis of quite a few different events that the NIC would be sensitive to even while the system was in sleep.

For example, in the datasheet for the Intel 82559 Fast Ethernet Controller (Intel doc 71468206, on pp. 27-28, the following types of so-called "interesting" packet events will cause the NIC to wake the system:

• ARP Packets (with Multiple IP addresses)
• Direct Packets (with or without type qualification)
• Neighbor Discovery Multicast Address Packet (‘ARP’ in IPv6 environment)
• NetBIOS over TCP/IP (NBT) Query Packet (under IPv4)
• Internetwork Package Exchange* (IPX) Diagnostic Packet

and, in general, if the functionality is enabled, the NIC will wake the system on any Link Status Change Event, "from a valid link to an invalid link condition or vice versa."

In this case, without doing further research, it sounds to me like the expiration of your system's DHCP lease is being treated as a "link status change event" and is thus causing the system to wake up from sleep mode to address the change.

The simplest solution is most likely going to be simply disabling the ability of the NIC to wake the system up.

 

I marched us down this "DHCP lease expired" path, but after looking at the event details again I am not so sure it was the right call. This same error could also occur if the machine woke up for some other reason and it was then unable to obtain a new DHCP lease. The IP address would, I am pretty sure, automatically expire when the machine wakes up. So it may not be that the DHCP server only gave out a short 5 minute lease. But, it COULD be that. Without digging into the machine a bit, I can't say for sure.

To the OP, if you want to find out if the lease is the issue. Drop to a command prompt and type "IPCONFIG /ALL" without the quotes. One of the sections you will see should look like this:
Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : xxxxxxxx.local
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Marvell Yukon 88E8036 PCI-E Fast Ethernet
Controller
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-13-xx-xx-xx-xx
DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx%8(Preferred)
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.16.20(Preferred)
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Monday, December 01, 2008 10:30:21 AM
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Tuesday, December 09, 2008 10:30:21 AM
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.16.2
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.16.2
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.16.2
Primary WINS Server . . . . . . . : 192.168.16.2
NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled

You can see the date and time stamp when the card obtained it's lease and when it was set to expire. My old DSL router used to give out 5 minute leases. I found this out when I tried to diagnose why, under WinXP I could never get a defrag to run. It kept restarting due to some disk IO. I finally, after days of a bloody forehead and brick wall, found that the DHCP lease was expiring every 5 minutes and the registry updates surrounding that were causing the defrag restart. (Thank you SysInternals dismon and filemon!) Once I unplugged the ethernet cable, the defrag would run to completion.

Gary