A tale of a laptop, a mouse and a chair
This is a bit off my normal discourse but, well, it may be of service to someone out there. I recently (yesterday) received a new Lenovo T61p laptop. Sweet. 1920×1200 screen, fast processor, big drive, … I’ve spent the past couple days installing stuff and getting it setup. For the most part it has gone swimmingly. For the most part.
Last night around 1230 I was finishing up some installs and decided to go to bed. As is my custom I suspended the laptop, got up from the desk and headed off. There was the normal “going to sleep beep” and as I walked away, the machine beeped again. It was waking up. Strange. It had been suspending fine earlier.
This sequence was repeated again and again over the following 1.5 hours always with machine waking up. I tried all manner of things (wake on lan settings, turning off wireless, …). No joy. I was starting to believe that it was the physical act of getting up and leaving that was causing the machine to wake. Enough. Haunted laptop? I turned the machine OFF and went to bed incredulous and confused.
This evening the experiments continued. In the end, after another 2 hours of suspend and resume experiements witnessed by an outside observer (wife), the problem was tracked down to a combination of a power management setting on the Mouse Device and my chair! No kidding, the chair.
The mouse was set to “Allow this device to wake the computer”. Makes sense that that would be a problem but I was being very careful not to touch the machine in any way thoughout the experiments. In fact, wiggling the mouse, banging the desk, … did NOT wake the machine.
That’s where the chair comes in. It turns out that my chair makes a bit of a thunk sound when I get up and that particular vibration was triggering a mouse button/wheel and waking the machine. Unplug the mouse (before suspend), OK. Get up slowly/quietly, OK. Mouse plugged into any of the three USB ports and the machine wakes up when I stand. Again, I kid you not.
There is probably a lesson in there somewhere about assumptions and side effects. I prefer to just suspend the machine and walk away shaking my head at how complex things are.
February 13th, 2008 at 9:14 am
On my MacBook, my Bluetooth mouse used to do this all the time; it was actually waking up the laptop even with the lid closed. It’s a confusing issue, because nothing should wake up a lid-closed MacBook; also, there is a distinction between mouse activity waking up from a sleep mode, and Bluetooth activity waking up from a sleep mode, and then BlueTooth activity via mouse activity waking up from a sleep mode.
To make matters worse, when my mouse isn’t planted on a flat surface, it seems like it sends out more bluetooth messages; kind of a like a turtle on it’s back - “help me, help me!”.
To make matters worse, occasionally the setting of “don’t wake up on mouse activity” somehow resets itself on occasion. I don’t think it’s magically switched over in a few month.
February 13th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Sounds like you are having too much fun … please stop.
February 13th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Have a look at this, you can actually list which devices may wake up the computer: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/02/13/7658352.aspx
February 14th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
I agree with Steve.
Positive vibrations.
Keep on rocking
R.