I have to laugh. I was poking around yesterday trying to see if MS had updated the old Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool for power options. It hasn’t so I accidentally fired off the old tool and let it run. Upon completion it told me it had “fixed” some things. This morning my experiment bit me on the hindquarters. Instead of starting up after a keyboard press or mouse click, I got …. nothing. I had to press the Power Button to wake up the system, after which all worked as expected. Alas, my troubleshooter test wrecks sleep/wake settings, and I had to go into Power Options to make things right again. Sigh.

Why Say: Troubleshooter Test Wrecks Sleep/Wake Settings?

What the troubleshooter “fixed” flew in the face of how I wanted my system to behave. When I asked Copilot what happened, it explained it as a kind of “own goal” resulting from running the tool. Its explanation is illuminating and a little humiliating for yours truly:

…the troubleshooter on its way out the door silently overrode a deliberate user setting, caused a real problem, and left no log entry explaining what it changed. That’s a tidy illustration of why automated “fixers” that don’t disclose what they’re changing are a liability.

True enough. Fixing the problem took only a few seconds:

1. Select Power Options from Control Panel
2. Click “Change advanced power settings”
3. Navigate to “USB Settings,” then “USB selective suspend setting”
4. Change both “On battery” and “Plugged in” from “Enabled” to “Disabled”

This keeps mouse and keyboard awake so either can wake the PC when it does something. That’s what I want. That’s what I got. And alas, that’s what the troubleshoot undid for me when it ran yesterday. It wanted to save power and that’s what selective suspend does.

Here in Windows-World there’s enough going on that I don’t need to create problems for myself. But that doesn’t stop me from doing it occasionally anyway. But now it’s fixed and I’m aware that I shouldn’t run msdt.exe unless I really need it. My exploration/experiment reminded me that some investigations require cleanup. Sigh again.