I’ve noticed a strange problem with my office PC of late, well I say of late it’s more like for the past year, the issue is very on and off. Sometimes it does this, sometimes it doesn’t with no real apparent notable reason. But what is “it”… Okay so I can put my PC into hibernate mode, the idea being that it’s all ready for when I come back. This seems the best option for me as it means the PC will come back to a running state with everything as I left it, in theory anyway!

A number of times I’ve done this, I go to lock up and just as I go to close the Stoodio door I hear the PC come back to life. Why? Or I lock up, no sign of the PC being on, come back later or in some cases the next day and it’s powered on at the login prompt. *sigh*
Well after a bit of digging I discovered with the help of the “powercfg” command what was causing this annoying little gripe.

powercfg -lastwake

Wake History Count - 1
Wake History [0]
  Wake Source Count - 1
  Wake Source [0]
    Type: Device
    Instance Path: PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_2B47103C&REV_10\4&7735024&0&00E6
    Friendly Name: Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller
    Description: Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller
    Manufacturer: Realtek

A Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller device? Okay so what’s that all about… A quick look through.

devmgmt.msc

Looking at the device Power Management settings it was apparent that this device was given permission to switch the machine on and off to “save power”! Yeah that’s really saving power! Go to Hibernate and then power itself back on.

I run a pretty modest set up, as in I like to tell the PC when I want to use it and as such I have no need for any fancy power management settings in my daily life. So there was only one thing for it… All off!!

Job done… hopefully!