1. Select the "Start" button in the bottom left hand corner (Windows Icon)
2. Select the "Settings" icon on left side
3. Now select the "System" option from the top left
4. Fifth from the top you should see "Power & Sleep", select this
5. In my version of Windows, on the far right side we see "Additional power settings", select this
6. A new window will open, now locate and select "Change plan settings"
7. Another new window will open, this time we select "Change advanced power settings"
8. We have finally arrived at our destination. This new window provides a number of different settings we want to change if available. Not all will be available on your machine so change as many as you are able to. Expand each section and verify sleep is allowed on each (none of them should say "Never"). The "Turn off hard disk after" for instance should be a lower time than your sleep setting ie: System set to sleep after 30min, Turn off HDD should be set to 20min. Some of the settings can be a bit vague, just try to set all of them to some form of 'power saving' or 'allow computer to sleep'. Typically you will find one in here that is clearly the culprit, for me it was the "USB selective suspend setting" which was set to "Disabled" meaning it wasn't putting any USB devices to sleep so mice, keyboards and headphones were constantly pinging my system to let it know they were active even if they weren't moving. worked like a charm on
Citrix VDI
9. Select "Apply" and then close out any open windows, restart the computer and let the system sleep naturally (leave it idle)
Device manager option
There are a TON of devices that could be preventing sleep and unfortunately, it's really hard to pinpoint which one is causing the problem. Our best advice is to simply go through the common ones such as network, display and CPU. The single most common culprit is usually the network devices, so we will cover that below
Network adapter power management
1. Select the "Start" button in the bottom left hand corner (Windows Icon)
2. Type "Device Manager" and select the first option
3. In the new window locate the "Network adapters" option and click the small " > " to open it up
4. Double click the primary network adapter, if you have more than one it's ok to perform these steps on each one if you are unsure which is primary
5. Navigate to the "Power Management" tab
6. Here you will find the option "Allow this device to wake the computer" and we actually want to deselect it. Most people do not need this and it seems a recent update has caused the network
controller to wake the computer or prevent sleep with ANY activity which is not how it was originally designed
7. Select "OK"
8. Close any open windows and Restart the computer
Device manager option continued...
Adjusting this setting will disable your ability to wake the machine using mouse movement or clicking. If this solves the problem of your system not sleeping though, you have to decide which you prefer: A system that won't sleep, or having to wake the system with your keyboard or power button
USB Mouse power options
1. Select the "Start" button in the bottom left hand corner (Windows Icon)
2. Type "Device Manager" and select the first option
3. In the new window locate the "Mice and other pointing devices" option and click the small " > " to open it up
4. Double click the primary mouse in use, if you have more than one it's ok to perform these steps on each one if you are unsure which is primary
5. Navigate to the "Power Management" tab
6. Here you will find the option "Allow this device to wake the computer" and we actually want to deselect it. As mentioned previously, this will disable the ability to wake your system with mouse movement or clicks
7. Select "OK"
8. Close any open windows and Restart the computer
