How do I troubleshoot something that's preventing sleep?

Question

Almost a month ago, my laptop running Windows 10 started not sleeping. In some instances, I would close the laptop and put it in my bag assuming that it slept, only to find out that it didn't (and it's very hot, and the battery is dead).

So far, I've done pretty much all the basic troubleshooting (AVG PC Tuneup, event viewer, sfc, dism, random registry tweaks that didn't work and were undone).

By trial and error, I've found the culprit, which is a service called NetSetupSvc. Disabling it would solve the sleep problem, but then it would cause another issue. When I plug in a network adapter, I couldn't use it since it wouldn't appear in Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections. Basically, the device did not get set up.

So, I have no choice but to enable it.

At this point, I am 99% confident that it's a networking issue (config/driver). Triple checked all the configs and they all look good. Disabled unnecessary items under Connection -> Properties until I tried only leaving TCP/IPv4, and the issue still remains.

Removed/reinstalled all network adapters under Device Manager, and it temporarily solved the problem (returned an hour later).

How do I proceed? I would like to reinstall Windows only as a last resort.

Additional note: When the lid is closed/sleep button is pressed, the laptop starts to "sleep" (screen off, music turns off), but is still very much turned on. The fan revs up after a while. It's like it froze somewhere between running and sleep mode. The only way to get out of this situation is a hard reboot.

Answer 1

To troubleshoot computer insomnia problems, I suggest you do the following:

1) open cmd (command prompt) as an administrator.

2) run the following command

POWERCFG /REQUESTS

In the image below you can see an example of what prevents my computer from entering any sleep state at the moment.

As you can see (marked with blue), I currently listen to some music and as a result, the driver of my High Definition Audio Device is signaling Windows that I am currently doing something, so because of this Windows wont enter any sleep state.

To summarize - something is preventing your computer from entering sleep state. it can be an application, driver, system service or process. to see what exactly is the cause use the command above and see for yourself.