Wakeup and sleep issues are common problems found in Windows Media Center (WMC), from XP to Windows 7 (perhaps Windows 8 as well).  This particular problem is about sleep. The media center PC does not go back to sleep after recording.

Further investigation reveals that the PC can go to sleep properly (according to the power management settings) without WMC running. Using the following shows the culprit, a USB audio device prevents the system from sleeping when WMC is open.

‘powercfg -requests’

The above command, executed under admin rights, states that “an audio stream is currently in use” associated with the USB audio device. I use the following to tell the system to ignore it and go on to sleep after the pre-set time has elapsed.

‘powercfg -requestsoverride driver “USB Audio Device” system’

Be careful when you copy the above command from a web browser and paste it directly on the CMD prompt because the blank space inside the name of the driver is not really a ‘space’ when pasted onto the CMD prompt window.

If you have a different device that is causing the problem, just replace “USB Audio Device” with the exact device name in your case. Click here to see a similar situation.

More Info (July 2014)

There is another driver ‘Legacy Kernel Caller’ that causes the sleep problem after a recent refresh of the Windows 7 system. Apparently this is from the driver of the TV tuner card (perhaps a different version from the previous installation). Just use a similar ‘requestsoverride’ described above and the sleep problem should be fixed.