Computer turned on by itself

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Hi

Not sure if this should go here or in GH but I guess it's probably software related rather than hardware related.

I was watching TV this morning and about 10 minutes after I had turned it on I saw the lights on my PC come on and it started to boot. It got to the press del to enter setup page then said overclock failed so I went into bios and the settings were all how I left them so I just exited and it booted fine. My PC is connected to the TV by a DVI cable if this makes any difference.

I was wandering if anyone here knows what may have caused this?
 
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It was turned off and had been off at the plug until I turned it on so that I could put the TV on.

Sorry for the ignorance but what is WOL?

I'll have a look at scheduled tasks this afternoon as I'm on my laptop atm
 
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may not of been fully shut down properly before the power was cut, this can sometimes lead to pc's turning on as soon as they receive power again. Iv only ever experienced such a thing with pc's brought from beige box pushers

WOL is wake on lan
 
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I'd imagine somewhere in the BIOS AC Loss behaviour is set to resume with power on rather than remain off. Hence if it didn't shut down properly before the mains was disconnected then it will power back on when mains is reconnected. This is the standard setting on most servers but it's supported on many consumer motherboards too
 
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I had this on my pc for awhile. Turned out WOL was on, but it was taking any packet as the WOL packet. So it kept turning on all by itself. Ended up having to change the WOL options for the network card via the drivers section in windows IIRC.
 
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I had a machine that did that years ago, never got around to the bottom of it just dealt with it. It was kinda creepy though, I'd go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night with my computer wailing (I had that stupid big thermaltake dragon orb on my processor, it sounded like a bloody banshee)
 
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I'd imagine somewhere in the BIOS AC Loss behaviour is set to resume with power on rather than remain off. Hence if it didn't shut down properly before the mains was disconnected then it will power back on when mains is reconnected. This is the standard setting on most servers but it's supported on many consumer motherboards too

I think it shut down properly but even if not it took about 10 minutes for it to start up again. Does anyone know where the setting for this is in the Asus bios?

I don't think it could be WOL as there is a network cable in there but it isn't connected to anything due to me needing to trail it all the way downstairs to the router whenever I want internet as I can't get my wi-fi card working with Win 7 x64 but thats another issue. If anyone knows where the WOL setting in the Asus bios is I'll check that too.

Thanks for the replies guys
 
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First you need to make sure your board supports WOL before wasting time looking for it, not all Asus boards support it, what model is it?

I still vote ghosties hiding in your trailing Ethernet wire :D

It's an Asus P5Q-E.
Just had a google and it looks like it's in
Power -> APM -> Power On by PCI Devices
If that's the case then it's disabled on mine
 
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I've just had a look at scheduled tasks and there do seem to be quite a few of them. It doesn't show any in the history though and there's none set for roughly 10:30 in the future, which is roughly when it turned on. If anyone wants me to post a screenshot showing the list I can do if this will help.
I'm running Win 7 RC btw if it makes any difference
 
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It has done it again today. I don't know when it turned on but I have just been into my room and heard the fans spinning. I turned the monitor on and it was on start up repair saying that it couldn't start even though it was fine last time I turned it off. I left it to run but it said that it couldn't repair and turned itself off. I have left it off for now and turned it off at the wall so it can't turn on again.

Does anyone have any ideas?
 
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Had a pc to fix week before last that was doing this, checked all the usual suspects as described here but it turned out to be the physical on/off momentary switch that was at fault so that is also worth checking. If you have a reset switch on your case attach that to the on/off headers and leave the power switch disconnected.

System I had it on was a dell with a custom I/O board containing USB, Headphone/Mic and the power switch on, they wanted just under ninety quid for a new one... my soldering iron said no :)
 
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My PC would do that sometimes, turned out the PSU was faulty. Antec weren't very co-operative in getting it RMA'd, so I bought a Corsair one which solved the problem.
 
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My pc is sometimes doing a similar thing., It's turning itself right back on immediatley after being shutdown but only if I ahve my phone connected or my external HDD connected and switched on. Is there such a thing as wake on usb?
 
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