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Windows 10: PC Won’t Go to Sleep Mode

Windows 10: PC Won’t Go to Sleep Mode

By Mitch Bartlett 68 Comments

Having problems where Microsoft Windows 10 won’t go into sleep mode? This tutorial will help you figure out the problem.

Fix 1 – Power Options

  1. Select the “Start” button, then select “Settings” (gear icon).
  2. Select “System“.
  3. Select “Power & sleep“.
  4. Ensure the “Sleep” setting is set to a desired value.
  5. Select “Additional power settings” in the right pane.
  6. Select “Change Plan Settings” next to the option that you have selected.
    Change power plan setting link
  7. Select “Change advanced power settings“.
    Change advanced power settings
  8. On the “Power Options” screen, you want to expand each setting and ensure that they allow the computer to go to sleep mode. In my case, the setting under “Multimedia settings” > “When sharing media” was set to “Prevent idling to sleep“. I had to set this to “Allow the computer to sleep“. If you’re feeling lazy, just hit the “Restore plan defaults” button and that should toggle all items to where sleeping is allowed in Windows 10.
    Power options

Fix 2 – Sensitive Mouse

If you have a sensitive mouse, any vibration near your PC could be keeping your machine awake. Try these steps to prevent the mouse from waking your machine.

  1. Select the “Start” button, then type “device“.
  2. Open “Device Manager“.
  3. Expand the “Mice and other pointing devices” section.
  4. Right-click on the mouse you are using, then choose “Properties“.
  5. Select the “Power Management” tab.
  6. Uncheck the “Allow this device to wake the computer” box, then select “OK“.

Fix 3 – Network Adapters

These steps are the same as Fix 2, only you’re checking under “Network adapters”.

  1. Select the “Start” button, then type “device“.
  2. Open “Device Manager“.
  3. Expand the “Network adapters” section.
  4. Check under each of the options by right-clicking and selecting “Properties“.
  5. Uncheck the “Allow this device to wake the computer” box, then select “OK” for each network card.

If you still have problems with your Windows 10 computer sleeping, there may be a program that is constantly running on your PC that keeps it awake, or even worse, a virus. Use my Bible For Making Your Windows Computer Run Faster to gain control over what’s running on your PC.

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Comments

  2. Harry Flatters says

    Brilliant thread, but unfortunately none of the fixes or suggestions cured my lack of ‘sleep’.

    Finally, it turned out to be my Thrustmaster joystick and throttle control that was preventing my PC from sleeping. Unplugged both (USB) devices and hey presto, normal sleep operations were resumed..

  3. TechiePro says

    I learnt the hard way to enable the HIbernate when closing the lid. This will save all the hassle with windows laptop not going to sleep. Sleep/Hybrid sleep in not efficient and the power button remains off. Only Hibernate is effective it seems.

  5. Ahyron says

    Disable Bluetooth as well. Due to certain paired devices in our home, this setting when left “ENABLED” was not allowing PC to sleep.

  6. Marius says

    Thanks a lot!!
    This issue with my Lenovo not sleeping while plugged in was making me crazy.

    Step 1 with Multimedia settings worked in my case.

    Now have to find out my other issue with fingerprint reader not working after waking from sleep.

  7. RayLin Stephens says

    omg! after months of my pc not sleeping/hibernating – it’s finally working again!

    now if only I could get my wheel to open new tabs/windows again. but I’m in pc heaven from your assistance.

    I’ve looked at many many articles and help guides – but yours is the only one that worked!

    thank you thank you thank you.

  8. Bartosz says

    Great great article! Worked for me. I have just need to check currently running programs. OBS was the issue. Thank you so much.

  10. Denis Foley says

    I noticed that my smartphone was indicating a problem with my wi-fi. Re-booting the router cured that AND the problem of my P.C. not sleeping.

  11. Ivan Rios says

    OMG!! The network settings option fixed it. Been struggling with this problem since I updated the OS to the new version. Uninstalling to previous, system restore, power management. windows update services stop, start, restart, etc. , nothing worked. MUCHAS GRACIAS!! :)

  12. Sean McManus says

    THANK-YOU!! The Network item (#3) was one that I did not think about…and turned out to be the one that was not allowing the computer to sleep. FYI computer is an ASUS desktop M32CD circa 2016 running Windows 10 version 20H2 build 19042.630

  13. Em Jay says

    David (and anyone else missing the Multimedia settings in Power Options):

    Your device may not be configured to show certain settings in Power Options, but you may be able to enable them by making some changes in Registry Editor. I recommend making a backup of your registry first.

    In Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\9596FB26-9850-41fd-AC3E-F7C3C00AFD4B. Check the value of the DWORD named “Attributes.” If this DWORD does not exist, create it by clicking Edit > New > DWORD (32-bit) Value and typing “Attributes” (without the quotes) for the name. Then, double click the Attributes DWORD, type “2” (without quotes) into the value data box, and click OK.

    When you reopen the Power Options window (or change the selected plan from the dropdown menu), the Multimedia settings should be available. You may have to repeat these steps (add an “Attributes” DWORD and set the value to “2”) for each of the subkeys under the main Multimedia settings key to enable the options for “When sharing media,” “Video playback quality bias,” and “When playing video.”

    You can also restore other hidden settings in the Power Options window by following these steps for the corresponding keys under PowerSettings.

  14. Tim says

    Perfect! I didn’t realize that I had a different selection under the ‘Power Options’ when I selected the ‘Change Plan Settings’ I saw that the Sleeps was set to Never. Changed it and now we are good!! THANK YOU!

  15. Suv says

    Tried all options listed as well as others and nothing works. Monitors shut off fine but PC does not. Tried clean boot and removing all start up programs and this didn’t work either. Very confused that I am stuck with a windows issue without resolution after a long time.

  16. Boris says

    Tried everything… Nothing works.. I have 4 monitors. Wakes up after 2 seconds of sleeping.. One of the monitors going back and force….

  18. Silvestro says

    In my case the earlier comment by Nils (to check “powercfg /requests”) helped. The request for the PC not to go to sleep was coming from the process spoolsv.exe. This is the spooler service responsible for managing spooled print/fax jobs. Looking at the Printers & Scanners settings, there were jobs pending in a queue for a printer that was no longer on the network. Cancelling those jobs seems to have solved the problem.

  19. Nomi Malik says

    Fix 2 – Sensitive Mouse
    ………………………………………………..
    worked for me!!

  20. Nils says

    You can use the command prompt to check if there are any processes stopping the PC from going to sleep by entering “powercfg /requests”

  22. David says

    Hello, trying to use Fix 1 to solve the problem. When I reach the advanced settins in the power options there is no multimedia settings. How come it is not there?!?

  23. jin says

    All above need to be checked. But they didn’t fix. My laptop won’t go to sleep when pluged-in but will work on battery. It worked before but not sure since when the issue happen, maybe the 2004 update. Nothing I found online worked. What worked for me is to turn lockscreen slideshow off. I don’t know why it is turned on. Go to settings->System-> Power&Sleep, if lockscreen slideshow is turned on, it will tell you that the screen and sleep settings don’t apply when the lock screen slideshow is playing. So you need go to Personalization->Lock Screen, change Slideshow to picture. This will allow windows to follow your power settings.

  24. Ana says

    AP I have the same problem! I suspend it or hibernate the PC but when I wake it up, It was shut down.
    I’ve tried everything. Did you solve this?

    “AP says

    April 20, 2019 at 9:12 pm

    I usually don’t shut down my PC and manually put it to sleep from the Start menu, when I’m about to go to bed or go out of the house.

    Recently, I encountered a strange problem: I would try to wake up the PC, only to find out it has already been shut down (powered off). Previously, tapping a keyboard key twice would instantly wake up the PC.”

  25. Arthur says

    Thank you. I would have never gone the extra step to find Media and change settings there. Cheers mate!

  26. Mac7 says

    Thank you so much. Fix 1 works for me. Your instruction was easy to follow and spot on. Good work!

  27. Homer Jay says

    I used the process in TWiStErRob’s post to determine that MS Edge Browser was keeping the PC from going to sleep. I closed my Edge browser and voila, sleep has returned!

  29. Vee says

    Run this command
    powercfg /SYSTEMSLEEPDIAGNOSTICS
    and it will generate the report very deep details.

  30. Rik says

    +1 Kudos to TWiStErRob because his suggestion to run “powercfg /trace” allowed me to identify a USB device (a TrackIR-5) which was stopping my system from sleeping.

  32. Tim says

    Mine would only sleep if the settings were short (5 minutes) I tried everything, then I read DEV1LDRAG0N comment here and removing the mouse pad fixed my problem too.

  34. Nadrog says

    Following these instructions helped – thank you!

    But, surprisingly, switching the settings back to original values did not cause previous problems to reappear!

  37. Kelly Redwine says

    I believe this will help! Wanted to comment before I put it to sleep. Also bookmarked this page.

  40. Warrior XV says

    TWiStErRob is a genius!! That comment is the only fix that worked for me. God bless you!!

  42. DEV1LDRAG0N says

    Try to get a different mouse pad. I tried all the steps non worked then i removed my mouse pad and pc went to sleep.

  47. Shamim says

    I tried all the methods mentioned above including fix 0 and still my computer didn’t sleep automatically. So I tried rebooting on selective startup services using “msconfig” and disabled all third-party services. That’s when I realised it was one of the services causing the issue. Once I found out which one it was I then disabled it permanently.
    This solved all my problems! Hope this helps someone as it took me a long time to figure out

  49. Manstein555 says

    thank you so much, i can finally put my pc to sleep and not turn it off/on all the time ! :-)

  50. David Nokes says

    I have tried all these but they do not work for me. With my issue i can put the computer to sleep in the start menu but it will not sleep automatically, i have set it to 1 minute to see if it attempts to sleep but it doesn’t, only the screen turns off. No devices are set to wake the PC, no wake timers are active. the only way it sleeps is it i manually put it to sleep. any insight to this?

  51. Jarrod Shumaker says

    I found this issue to be tied to Steam (the cloud PC gaming platform). After doing some reading and testing it has to do with the homepage and it’s potential to load audio and video. The recommendation and successful test I performed was to change steam to the library page versus the home. After doing this my monitor successfully went to sleep.

    Worth a shot for anyone using Steam and experiencing this issue.

  52. Florence Mills says

    All of the answers did not help me. I still can’t get my old sleep button, have to pull the plug every night and sign in the next morning

  53. TWiStErRob says

    After trying Fix 1 and finding that Fix 2 and 3 are not something I want to disable and they didn’t help anyway.

    I found there’s one more really important Fix 0 everyone should do!
    1. Open Start Menu
    2. Type cmd
    3. Right click Command prompt > Run as Administrator
    4. C:\WINDOWS\system32>cd %USERPROFILE%/Desktop
    5. C:\Users\you\Desktop>powercfg /energy

    Enabling tracing for 60 seconds…
    Observing system behavior…
    !! at this point it’ll stop for 60 seconds with a blinking cursor
    !! put your computer to sleep (which shouldn’t work)
    Analyzing trace data…
    Analysis complete.
    Energy efficiency problems were found.
    2 Errors
    See C:\Users\you\Desktop\energy-report.html for more details.

    6. Open the above HTML file in a browser.

    I had 2 errors there which told me what the problem is:

    System Availability Requests: System Required Request
    The program has made a request to prevent the system from automatically entering sleep.
    Requesting Process \Device\HarddiskVolume0\…\some\progam.exe

    System Availability Requests:Away Mode Request
    The program has made a request to enable Away Mode.
    Requesting Process \Device\HarddiskVolume0\…\some\progam.exe

    Exit the program and sleep well!

  54. Abdallah says

    Thank you very much, Fix 1 and 2 did it for me, I hope your friend gets better

  56. Chuds says

    Check what mouse you are using. My old mouse had a sleep facility but eventually died. My laptop mouse which had an on/off switch was then used and voila , my PC started sleeping again after inactivity. It was something that simple.

  57. AP says

    I usually don’t shut down my PC and manually put it to sleep from the Start menu, when I’m about to go to bed or go out of the house.

    Recently, I encountered a strange problem: I would try to wake up the PC, only to find out it has already been shut down (powered off). Previously, tapping a keyboard key twice would instantly wake up the PC.

  58. GaryT says

    I tried all of these and other suggestions and none of them worked. In the end my solution was to go back to the power management tab in the network card settings (in device manager) and put a tick in “Only allow a magic packet to wake the computer”. It also went to sleep with a tick in all three boxes but I haven’t left it for more than a minute to see if it wakes itself up (which it used to do) but at least it now goes to sleep,

  59. Kevin says

    I tried everything on this list and it didn’t work. If that happens to you, consider replacing your mouse. Even though it wasn’t moving, mine was constantly “on” and scanning the mouse pad. As soon as I replaced my mouse, everything started working as it’s supposed to. My old mouse was a Razer Ouroborus; new one is a Razer Mamba.

  60. Eric Luczynski says

    Thank you. Like most others in the list I was frustrated by on-all-the-time monitors even with the sleep time set to 15 minutes. Changing the multimedia setting worked.

  61. Oliver says

    Thanks that helped me very much! But i still got a problem, when i start the computer again after it has been in sleep mode the fans are running at high speed but then a few seconds later they are back at normal speed. It is not that big of a deal but any help is appreciated :)

  63. Bill says

    MS support people should know these. I called them twice and both times it was a default to “re-install windows”.

  65. ed says

    My computer hasn’t been falling to sleep or activiting the screen saver for some time now. Step 8 solved my problem. I would never have figured that out! Thanks!!

  66. wiseson says

    Your Fix 3 – Network Adapters resolved (now my desktop goes to hibernate/sleep!) my issue (i.e. desktop not going to hibernate/sleep).

    From another site I learned to run CMD in Superuser mode: powercfg /lastwake
    which revealed that my Network adapters (i.e. Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller
    was causing the wake!

    Thank you.

  67. Mahdi says

    You have no idea how much hassle you have saved me after months, years even of this pesky little problem. I was on the verge of begining to start editing system files based on trial and error from thousands of theories on the internet. Thank you, kind stranger.

  68. Julz says

    OMG…this was a life saver!!! I often need my pc to sleep not hibernate or shut down, so when I started popping back on when I put it to sleep I thought I was gonna pull my hair out and scream. Your instructions were ssoooooo easy to understand & follow for a totally non-technical Grandma. I appreciate your help, thank you very much.

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