What prevents Windows from entering standby?

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Is there a tool or method to find out, what prevents Windows Vista 32 bit from entering the standby mode? My home pc is set to standby after a certain time of inactivity. But quite often it just stays awake and I have know idea why. I know of things that will keep it awake and already checked devices and network to no avail. I suspect there is some application or service that tells the os to stay active and I hope there is some tool to find the culprit.

Arne

Posted 2012-09-24T21:22:22.323

Reputation: 153

1Any 3rd party driver or program running in the background can cause this. I use msconfig to start disabling startup programs and restart the PC to see if it sleeps now. – Moab – 2012-09-24T21:53:51.743

1Also check your devices in the device manager, right click=> properties =>power management=> "allow this device to wake up the computer". In my case, disabling that for a USB mouse fixed this. – terdon – 2012-09-24T21:57:26.447

Answers

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Right click CMD and run as Administrator. Enter powercfg -requests

If you are lucky, it may indicate a driver preventing sleep.

David Marshall

Posted 2012-09-24T21:22:22.323

Reputation: 6 698

In my case, I had external audio amplifiers plugged into two different computers. powercfg -requests indicated the audio driver was preventing the computer from entering sleep. I used powercfg -REQUESTSOVERRIDE DRIVER "driver name" SYSTEM to override this. See http://www.jasonhartman.net/2012/06/windows-7-wont-go-to-sleep-mode-audio.html, which is very helpful

– Dan Halbert – 2014-08-09T23:55:28.350

thanks, great! I also found pwrtest.exe from the Windows Driver Development Kit, but powercfg does not need to be installed. – Arne – 2012-09-25T14:40:35.803

Asked: 2012-09-24T21:22:22.323

Viewed: 1 490 times

Active: 2012-09-24T23:12:35.480