Computer wont autosleep

emp123

I leave my computer on over night as I use it as an alarm to wake me up in the morning and Im trying to get it to go to sleep when its not in use for more than an hour. It will shut off the display after 10 minutes, but it wont go to sleep. Ive done some googling and Ive seen suggested that turning off some wake from sleep options is the best course of action but I dont want to do this as I have a scheduled task set to run right before the computer is supposed to wake me up.

Im running Windows 7 Pro x64 (fully updated).

Ive tried turning off my mouse, unplugging my microphone, changing the sleep conditions but nothing will get it to go to sleep.

Draygo

Will it manually go to sleep?

emp123

Yeah, I probably should have mentioned that, but yes it will go to sleep when I tell it to.

kime

Just to make sure, you've changed the power options of "Change when the computer goes to sleep" for plugged in, right?

emp123

Im on a desktop so maybe thats why, but I dont see a "plugged in" setting.

Drows

My computer doesn't autosleep if steam or pandora are connected

kime

emp123 wrote: »

Im on a desktop so maybe thats why, but I dont see a "plugged in" setting.

That would be why, yeah. My bad, shouldn't have assumed it was a laptop haha.

A quick google search showed this. In particular, this post has a couple solutions perhaps?

Spoiler:

Rich wrote:

Ok guys, I have figured something out. Try going to your Task Scheduler. As
soon as you open it up, do a couple of errors pop up along the lines of
"Defrag Scheduler is corrupted or tampered with"? I was also getting one
stating that "Task Reminders - (Your User Name) is corrupted. User name not
found". Here is my theory: Some tasks are corrupted and keep trying to run,
keeping the computer awake.

I did two things, and I don't know which fixed it. First off, a while back
I changed the name of my computer from e1505 to Laptop. That definitely
screwed up the Task Reminders task with Windows Calendar for some reason. I
could find no way to update the computer name in Windows Calendar so it knows
that my user name is in fact valid so I just changed the computer name back.
As soon as I did that it fixed that error.

Next I reinstalled Vista. That managed to fix my defrag scheduled task
corruption and now the computer sleeps just fine. If you pop in the Vista
disk, reinstall, and just choose to keep all programs and settings it seems
to work just like XP's repair function. I didn't lose a document or program,
and even my desktop remained the same.

If you changed the name of you computer at any point, try changing it back.
If that doesn't fix things, try the Vista reinstall. It worked for me

It says to check the Task Scheduler and see if any errors pop up automatically. I assume none do, since you've probably been to that frequently trying to figure this out, but that's worth a try.

The second option is to reinstall/repair the OS while keeping all your programs/files. I'd probably wait on that till you try other things, don't want to make a mistake and lose everything

emp123

Yeah, no errors pop up in the task scheduler and I doubt a reinstall of the OS is necessary.

I do keep Steam running though.

Adus

Go to your Advanced Power Options settings and click down all the + boxes, and make sure every option that has the choice "Allow the computer to sleep" is selected, like Multimedia Settings - When Sharing Media.

emp123

Will that allow it to sleep while Im watching a video, or will that only allow it to sleep if Im streaming a video to another computer?

Adus

That was just an example, but if you didn't have that option selected for that, then the computer would never sleep while you have media sharing enabled. Not necessarily actively streaming something, but just having the option on.

You said you can manually put it to sleep so that particular one probably isn't the issue, but check the list.

emp123

I switched the multimedia setting to "Allow computer to sleep" and I exited Steam, but the computer still didnt sleep.

I looked through the power options and nothing looks like it should be keeping it awake (theres some stuff about CPU and PCI power usage, but I didnt see any sleep settings).

I guess I'll have to remember to manually put it to sleep.

emp123

Okay, so I think my computer likes to sleep now except it will only sleep if the task I have set up in the Task Scheduler hasnt run yet. Im not entirely sure why this is.