Why Your Vista PC Won’t Go to Sleep
By: Nathan Weinberg
For the last few days, my wife’s PC (that I’m almost done building) wouldn’t go to sleep when I hit the appropriate button on the keyboard. Instead, the screen would fade to black, but the loud fans would keep going and the whole thing would come right back awake the instant I moved the mouse. It took about ten minutes to figure out why this was happening, so if you need a solution, here it is.
If you’ve recently turned on media sharing on your PC (like you recently connected it to an Xbox 360 or other remote media device, or even just messed with the media settings), Windows probably activated “Away Mode” and didn’t bother telling you that. Thanks a lot.
Away Mode is a really cool idea, in theory. It’s the idea that if Windows is sharing media with another PC or Media Center Extender, when you put it to sleep it instead goes into a quiet state, shutting off the screen and speakers, and ignoring the mouse and keyboard. However, while the PC may appear off, it is anything but. The system is still drawing almost the same amount of power, plus all the fans are running as normal, which can get annoying if we’re talking a bedroom media PC.
If you don’t need Away Mode, especially since the same benefits can often be had by just turning off the monitor, go into your power settings. Type Power Options in the Start Menu and hit Enter, then under your currently selected power plan, hit “Change plan settings“. Click “Change advanced power settings” on the next page, then on the dialog that pops up, scroll to the bottom and find Multimedia settings. If “When sharing media” is set to “Allow the computer to enter Away Mode”, you’ve found the culprit.
Just switch the setting to “Allow the computer to sleep“. If you want the PC to be able to sleep, but not to go to sleep on its own (when you stop using it for a while), select “Prevent idling to sleep“. And there you go, you’ve shut off Away mode and re-enabled Sleep for your system. Celebrate!
This isn’t to say that everyone should disable Away Mode, but rather that it isn’t for everyone, and if it’s annoying you, just get rid of it. I wish Away Mode were smart enough to suspend the computer completely when not in use, so the fans turned off, and only woke it when recording TV or streaming media, and even then in a quieter state, but that’s not possible right now.