WD19TB dock appears to turn on laptop after shutdown

Question

I have an XPS 15 9510 that I use with a dell WD19TB docking station.  This setup has worked well for me for over six months.  I have multiple exterior devices plugged into the dock and have had no issues with any of them.  I have had a single issue I find puzzling, however.  Frequently during the night when the system has been completely shutdown my XPS will turn on without intervention from me.  I have gone through the usual troubleshooting procedures looking into this issue and have changed several operating system and BIOS settings that can cause this issue.  This has not resolved the problem.  I can open the Windows Event Viewer and see that the system has turned on and various different Event ID's are given when this happens.  These ID's did not seem to explain the reason for the system turning on:  just a normal part of computer housekeeping that seems to be present no matter how the sysem is activated.  They are the same types of ID's that I see when I turn the system on myself.  I first noticed this when my laptop was on first thing in the morning without me turning it on.  Since I had so extensively troubleshooted this and could find no other settings I could change that would keep this from happening I decided to test whether the dock could be involved.  Since I can turn on my laptop by depressing the dock button I reasoned that it would be possible that the dock was responsible for turning on my system at night.  For the last week I have tested this idea by unplugging my laptop from the dock after shutting down the system and dock for the night.  I have not seen the system on for this whole week in the morning when I first check my pc.  I've also verified with the Event Viewer that my laptop has not been on any of these nights as well.  One day I did not use my pc at all and the system stayed off that whole day and did not turn on until the following morning until I turned it on myself.  As a final check I plugged the dock back in last night and, sure enough, my laptop was running this AM.  Can anyone explain this dock behavior?  I keep my system BIOS and dock firmware up to date so that is not the issue.  I've considered the possibilty that since the dock is hardwire connected to my router that perhaps something on the network is turning on the dock and the laptop, but I have made several changes in Windows and in the BIOS that supposedly render that not possible.  Perhaps I could try unplugging just the network cable for a few nights and see if that resolves the issue.  I can find no evidence that there is a dock utility that allows me to change settings within the dock itself.  Anyone else have this issue?  Unplugging the laptop each night is not a particular bother in a system that otherwise functions so well, but it bothers me enough that I'd thought I'd ask for others experiences.

StZill · Accepted Answer

Ok,  I've gone an additional 3 days without the system turning on after shutdown.  I feel comfortable that the issue has been resolved.  I'm going to mark it as solved.

StZill · Accepted Answer

As an addendum to my previous posts:  I have since discovered that my solution to the issue presented did not work in all situations as after several days my system woke up again without any input from me.  Two solutions that seem to work every time are disconnecting the thunderbolt docking station or disconnecting the ethernet cable between the router and the docking station.  As stated before both of those solutions were not acceptable to me as they required me to physically disconnect a cable in order to prevent my laptop from turning on unexpectedly.  It seemed from these solutions that something from the network was awaking the docking station and then in turn, turning on the computer.  I use an Archer AX21 router which I can control with an iphone app called Tether.  I can use that app to shutdown web access to any device connected to the network, whether by cable or WiFi.  It was very easy to use the app to shut down the internet connection to the docking station.  I started doing that each evening before retiring to bed.  It has now been a week and this solution has worked 100% of the time.  Another thing I discovered was by using the laptop's WiFi capabilities to hook up to the router I was able to still access the web without having the signal pass through the docking station.  This did not affect the situation at all.  So I am leaving the cable shut down most of the time to take the docking station out of the network picture and using WiFi most of the time.  When I need the added speed that cabled router access provides it is easy to use Tether to enable it within a few seconds and then shut it down later to prevent my system from waking from shutdowns.  It appears now that I have really resolved the issue.

d5123101 · Answer

Thanks for the extensive writeup. Disconnecting the network cable from the dock to see if that fixes the problem sounds like a smart idea. Were the settings you changed in Windows regarding waking the computer from network? BIOS also has similar settings (like Wake on LAN)

StZill · Answer

Yes, I changed the settings in Windows and the BIOS regarding waking the computer from the network.  As previously stated, this did not resolve the issue.  The  only way I could prevent my system from turning on without my intervention was to disconnect the dock thunderbolt cable.  After writing my post I did disconnect the network cable between the router and the dock for one night and my system did not wake up.  However, disconnecting cables each night is a somewhat unsatisfying if effective solution.  I did some more exploring in the Windows Device Manager and found a device under the 'System Devices' subheading called the 'Thunderbolt(TM) Controller - 9A21'.  Right clicking on that and choosing 'Properties' brings up the property box.  I chose the 'Power Management' tab and cleared the check box next to 'Allow this device to wake the computer'.  This appears to have resolved the issue:  at least temporarily as I will have to monitor my system for several more shutdown periods.  If this fails and my PC continues to have the same problem, I will report back here.  Otherwise it appears that all is good.  One other thing:  I considered the possibility that not allowing the Thunderbolt Controller device to wake the computer might affect the docking station ability to turn on the laptop with the dock button,  This appears not to be the case as things are working as expected.  I come to my desk and see a system that has remained shutdown since I shut it down and starts as expected by pressing the docks button without having to open the laptop lid.

d5123101 · Answer

Amazing I'm glad your ideas worked. If all does end up successful please come back here and mark your post as solved.

StZill · Answer

OK, it’s been about 3 months since I first posted about this issue. I you read my prior posts you will read about the troubleshooting I did and the strategies I used to solve this issue of my XPS 15 9510 turning on by itself. I determined that my docking station had to be connected to my laptop for this behavior to occur. Several times I thought I had resolved the issue only to have it crop up again later. My last attempt seemed to work for a period of time:  using my phone tether app to shutdown any network connection through the docking station. However, after a period of time the system started shutting down again. I decided not to report back here until I found a solution that worked for an extended period of time.  One thing that seemed obvious to me was that disconnecting the docking station from the pc worked every time. Using this fact I devised a different strategy. Disconnecting the docking station from the pc  each time to prevent this was entirely unacceptable, so I purchased a remote control outlet. This an inexpensive small device that consists of a plug controlled by a small remote control. The plug I placed between the power bar and the docking station power supply. Now to turn my system on when being used as a desktop I simply press the ON button on the remote control which turns on power to the docking station which in turn boots the XPS up. One button starts my system up and in minutes I can use the laptop. When I shutdown I do it with windows, and when the docking station light goes out I press the OFF button on the remote which shuts off power to the docking station. This has prevented my XPS from turning on by itself for 7-8 weeks.  The laptop never turns on when being used with its own power supply or on battery. I think I can now deem this problem fully resolved.

XPS

WD19TB dock appears to turn on laptop after shutdown

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