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In my desire to figure out why my laptop wakes at night, I can't understand the purpose of the StartMenuExperienceHost waketimer. What is the designed purpose for this waking? Is this related to Windows Updates?

I noticed that this waketimer is not set when I check it a few times during the first few hours after a reboot but then, for no reason that I can see (maybe a task in Task Scheduler?), it later gets set somehow. After getting set, the date field has always been corrupted over the last year like there is some bug (time has always been constant at 20:48:05). You can see my command line and the set waketimer below. For the record, I have disabled "Allow wake timers" in "Power Options", but that apparently does not work for my hardware so I'm looking to understand if this StartMenuExperienceHost is playing some role.

By the way, it looks like ShellExperienceHost does similar things in internet rumors (maybe for an older version of Windows), so I would even be happy with an answer for that process.

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> powercfg -waketimers
Timer set by [PROCESS] \Device\HarddiskVolume3\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.Windows.StartMenuExperienceHost_cw5n1h2txyewy\StartMenuExperienceHost.exe expires at 20:48:05 on .
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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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I spend almost week solving the problem of StartMenuExperienceHost_cw5n1h2txyewy is randomly starting my computer. And the solution was super easy. Open Windows Start menu and remove any automatically generated icons (weather, photos thumbnails, games etc.). After restart, this job disappeared from powercfg /waketimers.

enter image description here

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  • This is what did it for me as well after trying every other solution on the internet from disabling wake timers to editing Reboot via Task Scheduler to editing the Group Policy to disable Windows Update waking my PC, so thank you for posting this answer. For future readers, simply right-click each of those "Live Tiles" and remove them. (Just in case, before removing them, I right-clicked and disabled each of their Live Tile options which made them static tiles before removing each tile.) My Wake Timers list (powercfg -waketimers) is finally 100% clear!
    – ProgrammerGirl
    Commented Mar 15, 2021 at 4:47
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This ( linked to this ) worked for me :

Finally I cracked it! While looking for things to try, I stumbled into Microsoft community discussion System keeps waking. ShellExperienceHost.exe. Build 17074. There one of the suggestions was to check the Local Group Policy. There is Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Updates > Enabling Windows Update Power Management to automatically wake up the system to install scheduled updates. Setting it to Disabled makes the difference!

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  • I had already seen that (and the fix does not work for me since I have the Home edition which has no group policies). And, I don't want to change my question to fixing my wake problem since I have that other question posted separately (though both of these questions are unanswered, it's obvious that many people are having the same problem from the number of views).
    – bobuhito
    Commented Apr 26, 2020 at 14:18
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    Oh Microsoft, don't you guys have better things to do then introducing such disturbing features?
    – holzkohlengrill
    Commented Jan 24, 2021 at 13:07
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Had the same problem, tried all the usual solutions (Power Options, Group policy, regedit etc.) didn't help. Since it says "Timer set by [PROCESS]" I figured I just kill the useless process in the task manager. Windows restarted it, of course, but now the wake timer in powercfg -waketimers output is gone. Hopefully for good.

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