Why does my laptop wake from standby in the middle of the night?

I usually leave my laptop (Vostro 1400 running XP) 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 know that my computer wakes up occasionally for things like checking email but it goes back to sleep...

 

It's haunted. Perform an exorcism and you'll be fine.

Probably a scheduled program, do you have windows update check around that time?

 

Have a look in the event log and see what is triggering the wakeup. It could be some software checking for an update. You can also go into the power management and make sure that no devices are allowed to wake up the computer.

I use hibernate and not sleep for overnight - there's far less risk of these unwanted wake ups.

John

 

Could be your ethernet setting. Go into Device Manager and go the the advanced tab of your ethernet driver and disable wake on setting.

Hopefully, that helps.

 

It's a ghost

 

What time is your antivirus set to check for updates? What time is Windows Update set to check for updates?

Gary

 

after all the things mentioned above dont work then let us know..

i had a similar problem on my XP laptop long back..fixed it.

 

Or, Wake-on-LAN could be enabled in BIOS. Go to BIOS and disable this setting if it's there. That did the trick for me once.

 

Thanks for all the suggestions everybody. I will look into it and post back results.

 

It could also be something like a connected USB device, depending on how many devices have been enabled to trigger a wake signal on the computer (worse yet, it may be being caused by a device that is not supposed to be sending a wake signal, but that has a buggy implementation that allows it to do so).

The best advice right now is John Ratsey's - check the performance logs and, if they're not set up to log right now, set them up so that they log wake events.

 

it is most probably a scheduled service, which are normally configured to run early in the morning. you should disable automatic updating and disable automatic defragmenting/ virus checks, as a previous poster said- the event log should tell you what