How to find everything you want

So, you have this wizard friend who seems to know everything or finds everything really quick. Right? You can be that wizard as well. It's pretty simple. I'll try to keep it short.

"Be concise." - Me, 2024

That's it. Let's assume that you're having a problem. Our imaginary problem is that your computer randomly wakes up from the sleep. Why? How? you want some answers. Now, we will go get them.

Step 1. Analyze the problem

What exactly is wrong? Your computer comes back from sleep. Is there a pattern? Does it occur at 3 am everyday or is it completely random? Any other issues? Maybe your computer makes a beep noise while waking up. For simplicity sake, let's assume it doesn't.

Step 2. Select your search words

Yes, words. Don't build fancy long sentences unless you're talking to an AI. Search engines will work better with ooga booga caveman language, at least for me.

For our case, I'd Google something such as "computer wake up randomly". See what I did there? "Computer" is what's having the problem. "Wake up" is the problem. "Randomly" is the part where I give some details about the issue.

Step 3. Going through results

If you can't find an answer in the 1st page, that's not the right search. Try again. For my case How to Stop Your Windows PC From Randomly Waking Up From Sleep Mode by PCMag came up.

It gives correct commands. At the time of writing this I see powercfg -lastwake. For me, the result is 0. (I mean, I don't have this issue.) If you actually had something though, it'd look something similar to below.

On this case you can see that Acronis is causing the wake up. You can take proper action from here. There are some other suggestions throughout the page as well.

Now, let's assume that we didn't do caveman search but instead we searched for something like "my computer sometimes turns itself on".

This time first result for me was My PC turns on by itself during the night (SOLVED) on Microsoft's answers section. They kept talking about wake on lan etc. this doesn't help with actually solving the problem.

Now you know the dark magic. Enjoy your improved life.

tl;dr: Be concise with your questions, get concise answers.