Windows Vista, by default, goes into sleep mode instead of powering off.
A nice functionality, sometimes I don’t reboot my PC for weeks.
However, when I sleep my Vista and then unplug my USB mouse, the machine wakes up again. This can be anoying when you want to leave. A workaround is to unplug your USB mouse before sleeping the machine 🙂
A better solution is this:
1) Check which devices are capable of waking up your machine when sleeping by opening a command prompt and run the following command:
powercfg /devicequery wake_programmable
You might get something like this:
Logitech USB iFeel Mouse (002)
Intel(R) 82566MM Gigabit Network Connection
Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN
 AuthenTec Inc. AES2501A
Then open to device manager, go to the device you think is causing the wake up (my mouse in this example), double click it and choose power management.
Disable the checkbox “Allow this device to wake the computer”
April 30th, 2010 at 23:14
Thanks for that! Worked on Windows 7 as well!
February 16th, 2013 at 15:51
Wow Pieter, dude thank you!
This has been bothering me for years, to the point where I was actually physically stressed every time I “turned the pc off”…and heaven forbid I forgot to unplug the mouse first. Seriously though, how is/was the feature EVER useful?!
Thank you, really. I never bothered to look it up until tonight, I figured it wa some freak thing with MY computer only. Who knew google searching would bring me here.
Cheers man,
Vinko