Wake timers in Windows

Hi all,

I’m the tech guy in the family so don’t own the 12th gen framework laptop in question but persuaded my Dad to get one and am helping with it. The issue is I can’t get it to automatically wake from sleep (let alone fully shutdown which is actually the main goal). The goal is to have it wake at 4am in the morning to do a backup to the NAS. Both my personal computers, my previous laptop, my Dad’s previous desktop and my Mum’s laptop have been able to do this. Either using the maintenance settings to automatically wake it, or task scheduler’s “wake the PC to run this task”, or a setting in the bios that happened to be available. I can’t get any of the above to work on the framework though.
Maintenance is set to wake the computer at 4am, though the checkbox for it is disabled, it is checked. The scheduled backup task is also set to wake the computer and I can see it if I enter

powercfg /waketimers

Wake timers are enabled in the AC and DC settings of all power plans. I’ve tried disabling hibernation, fast startup and hybrid sleep (which I had to do through cmd as it’s not available in the GUI). No effect. And all of this doesn’t even work when the computer is just put to sleep, let alone fully shut down. From my testing, if I schedule a basic task to echo %time% to a file, scheduled to run in a couple of minutes and to wake the computer, then put the computer to sleep: the computer doesn’t wake and the task is only run once I wake the computer up (even though the option to run the task as soon after the scheduled time is missed is not enabled).

I checked the BIOS too and couldn’t find anything useful in there, like enable/disable wake timers or even set a manual scheduled wake time.

So yeah, I’m a bit stumped. I can think of sub-par workaround like having a desktop shortcut to do a backup then shut down, run manually every evening. But surely it must be possible to have the thing wake at a certain time, from sleep if not fully shut down?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

David

P.S. is there a “Framework Windows” tag or category? I’ve nothing against Linux, just seems difficult to search this forum for Windows-only stuff

Bu bump. Surely it’s not the case that the Framework laptop doesn’t support wake timers?

@David_Alban when you are using wake timers is the system AC or DC?
In AC, we should go to S4, and stay in S4 until the RTC timer fires.

Hi Kieran and thanks for replying,

Due to the lack of response on here, I ended up contacting support directly by email and am currently investigating it there. I last emailed them on Tuesday, so expect a reply soon, given they usually reply promptly, but it’s been 4th of July.
Anyway, they suggested trying without the expansion modules connected, which I hadn’t thought of. They also asked that I do bois update, reset bios settings, windows update, sfc and dism. All of these, however, haven’t made a difference and it is still yet to wake from sleep, either due to a wake timer (as observed with powercfg /waketimers) or the built in Windows Maintenance.

To your question, I’ve tried both AC and DC, multiple times, as well as from sleep (both from the start menu and closing the lid) and shut down.

As for S4 (and S3/S5), I’m not entirely sure how to monitor the sleep state. I can say it definitely doesn’t wake to run tasks from whatever states it enters when “Shutdown” or put to “Sleep”. I would expect those to be S5 (or 4) and S3 respectively, but my experience of Windows 11 on other computers is it does sleep states differently to 10 - like it decides for you.

For example, on both the Windows 11 machines I have access to (this Framework and my work’s Lenovo Thinkpad), they spam the event log with bursts of “UserModePowerService” messages every second or so as described here: XPS 15 9520 frequent UserModePowerService events : DellXPS (reddit.com)
However, the advice there is that it’s caused by “Intel Dynamic Tuning Technology Extension” under “System Devices” in hardware manager, but neither the Framework nor Thickpad have such a device.

I also observe pairs of these in the event viewer, but I think that’s just a red herring relating to the Wi-Fi card:


Can anyone confirm that their device does wake from either sleep or shutdown, either on AC or DC, due to a task scheduler task (creating a wake timer)?

For reference, this is a link to the tests I’m doing using Task Scheduler, and the results of them. I’ve already shared these with Framework support via email
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AhhuisI6ys1Ak4Ez1jyMhDfGVwt-Ag?e=zXdCTm

Cheers