Windows sleep places your computer in a low-power consumption state to save energy. Before doing so, it saves all your activity. By sleeping instead of shutting down, users can get back to work quickly and resume what they were doing. Microsoft suggests that you only use the feature when you expect to be away from your PC for a time, but the default behavior might put your PC to sleep more often than you’d like. There are a number of reasons to disable the feature. Some find it irritating to wait for Windows to wake up on older PCs. Others complain that it sleeps too frequently, like during a quick bathroom break or a trip to the kitchen. And of course, any large downloads can be suspended by sleep. Regardless of why you want to change this behavior, it’s a pretty simple task and we’ll walk you through it below.

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How to Disable Windows 11’s Auto Sleep Feature

  1. To disable sleep, the first thing you need to do is to right-click on the Start menu icon.
  2. Select Power Options. From here, you should get a window that shows you different power consumption settings.
  3. Under the Power section, click Screen and sleep. The window will display a list of different power states. The last two refer to how sleep behaves depending on your computer’s power source. 
  4. Click on the dropdown beside “On battery power, put my device to sleep after” and “When plugged in, put my device to sleep after.” 
  5. Select Never from both dropdowns. There you have it, your computer will no longer automatically sleep unless you manually ask it to.