Static electricity and PC wakeup

[jimhoyle]

I have had a problem for years where my desktop PC wakes itself up due to static electricity. It gets worse in winter (on cold days). I have isolated the problem to a certain USB device or USB cable. I have a USB hub with four devices, one of them is a USB printer. When I disconnect that, the problem is gone. Perhaps it's because that cable kind of touches the wall and goes under the table more than the other devices. Or perhaps it's just the cable, but I don't want to change that just yet because it's a lot of work (involving dismantling my desk).

The computer wakes up when I do things such as move on the floor with my chair or switch on/off my amplifier (which is near the USB device but other than that is unrelated).

My question is, is there a simple solution? For example some kind of static discharge resilient USB cable (A-B) or an USB adapter canceling static electricity or something like that? Is there some trick to position the cable so that it would not pick up static discharges? Or should I just try some expensive Lindy USB cable and see if that helps?

 

[vailr]

How old is the computer's power supply? Might try upgrading to a current model "Haswell compatible" PSU.

 

[mfenn]

You should be able to disallow the problem device from waking the computer through the Device Manager.

 

[Cerb]

Mfenn's solution should be the best. Printers are covered in plastic, so need to be class II (no exposed high voltage/high current), which also basically means there's not much you can do for it that wouldn't be risky to the printer's internals. The USB hub could be a part of it, but if you need the hub, there's not too much you can do there--at least not easily and cheaply, in a way that wouldn't require the desk disassembly.

Now, that said, are all 3 devices plugged into the same wall outlet? If not, try putting them all on the same one.

 

[jimhoyle]

The PSU is Corsair AX650W, 2 years old. However that was eventually unrelated. I could do "powercfg -devicequery wake_armed" and these were listed:

HID Keyboard Device (012)
Logitech HID-compliant G3/MX518 Optical Mouse (009)
Logitech HID-compliant Unifying keyboard (003)

Now that I played around with those more I realized that the last one was not useful for anything. It didn't work as expected, the keyboard didn't wake up the computer with that. However, with the first line it did. Both were under Device Manager / Mice and other pointing devices.

I now gave up the possibility to wake up the computer with keyboard. That isn't necessary. And it seems that this has also taken away the static discharge wakeup. It's a bit strange as this keyboard is wireless and the receiver is quite far away from the USB-hub/cable/printer causing the wakeup problem.

But it seems that again my problem was fixed in a very simple way because of your help. Thanks alot! :awe:

 

[mfenn]

Glad it worked out for you!