PreventWake: Find Out What Keeps Waking Your PC
You put your PC to sleep, and in the morning the screen is on, the fans are running, or it has been awake half the night. Something woke it up, but Windows buries the answer in its event log and in a pile of power settings. PreventWake changes that: Find out exactly what keeps waking your PC from sleep and stop it with one click.
Nothing Is Permanent
Every change is recorded with the original setting, so you can put anything back exactly as it was. The Undo window lists every change PreventWake has made, and it even tells you if Windows or a driver quietly switched a fix back on its own.
What It Does
See your last 10 wake-ups
PreventWake reads the record Windows keeps every time your PC wakes up and lists the 10 most recent: when it woke, when it went to sleep, how long it was asleep, and what woke it. Each wake-up is sorted into a simple type: You (power button), Device (mouse, keyboard, network card), Timer (Windows Update, maintenance, a scheduled task) or Unknown. Viewing wake-ups needs no admin rights.
Plain-English answers
Click a row and the box underneath explains what happened. “USB Root Hub” becomes “a mouse that got bumped or a wireless receiver picking up a signal,” followed by the exact steps to fix it.
One-click fixes
| When the cause is… | PreventWake will… |
|---|---|
| A device | Stop that one device from waking the PC. It still works normally otherwise. |
| Windows Update | Turn off wake timers in all your power plans, plugged in and on battery. |
| Nightly maintenance | Stop Windows Automatic Maintenance from waking the PC. |
| A program’s scheduled task | Untick “Wake the computer to run this task” on that one task. |
Before each fix PreventWake explains the side effects and asks you to confirm. Afterwards it checks that the change really took effect, so you never get a false “Done.”
What can wake this PC
A bumped mouse is the number-one cause of surprise wake-ups. This window lists every device Windows allows to wake your PC (mice, keyboards, network cards, Bluetooth devices, USB ports) with a switch to turn each one off or back on. It warns you before you turn off the last keyboard, so a key press can still wake the PC.
Safe by design, easy to support
PreventWake makes only changes from a fixed list and refuses to touch settings Windows protects. One button copies a complete diagnostics report to your clipboard, ready to paste into an email. Hover over any button or column for a quick tip.
Requirements
- Windows 10 or Windows 11
- AutoHotkey v2.0.2 or newer
- Viewing wake-ups: any user account. Applying or undoing a fix: administrator permission (Windows asks each time).
- Includes a full user guide (HTML and PDF)
Stop guessing. Find out exactly what keeps waking your PC from sleep and stop it with one click.
