I’ve noticed that when my Acer Windows 10 laptop is on battery mode, it sleeps after a very short amount of time, but when plugged in it never sleeps. How do I change sleep settings in Win10?
Turns out you’re asking about one of the most important settings related to the overall battery life of your computer: energy management. Your screen is the biggest power hog of everything on your computer and so the more it can turn off the display or even go into an even greater “sleep” mode, the longer your battery will last. There are plenty of times during a day that it’s safe for this to happen, like if you step away for five minutes for a restroom break: your computer can preserve that power for when you’re actually doing stuff and eke out just a bit more battery life.
At the same time, when your computer’s plugged into the wall, there’s much less need for energy management because it’s not preserving battery life at all. Still, it’s unusual to have a computer set up so that when plugged in it never goes to sleep, particularly if the display never turns off too. You might have a lovely screensaver (I’m partial to the Microsoft Bing screensaver) but after a few minutes, it’s better to have your screen turn off!
Turns out that in Windows 10 / Win10.1 there are two different areas where you can set and adjust your energy settings. To start out, let’s get to the easy one: Search Cortana for “sleep“, as shown:
The default match is a good one: Click on “Power & sleep settings” to proceed.
Notice here that like most other operating systems, Windows separates out when your screen goes dark and when the computer itself goes into “sleep” mode: Your system could be working just fine streaming music, running calculations or even tracking a group Skype call, even with the display off. Most people have the display screen sleep quickly and the computer sleep more slowly. You see the default settings above: 10 minutes for screen sleep on battery, 15 when plugged in.
Scroll down just a bit and you’ll see system sleep settings too:
You can tweak these as desired – or make them all the same if you want – but let’s click on “Additional power settings” so you can see the second area in your OS where these sort of tweaks can be managed!
This is more the old school Windows interface at play here, with “power plans”, but it can be useful to check and see what Microsoft recommends. After all, they have data on millions of computers and user configurations, right?
The one thing I really appreciate is that Microsoft Windows 10 also lets you change what happens when the power button on the computer is pressed. Yup, you can change that! Click on “Choose what the power button does” on the left side and you’ll see what I mean:
Here you can see the sneaky trick that is configured: On battery a push of the power button actually puts the computer to “sleep” (which affects both the display and the system itself), while that same power button only turns off the display if the computer’s plugged into the wall. Same button, different functions.
Want to change that? Here are your options for battery or plugged in:
You can see that there are a number of things you can do, including making the power button do nothing at all! I don’t recommend that, I suspect it’d drive most people crazy, but if you know that’s how you configured it, well, maybe it wouldn’t’ be so frustrating!
Now that you know all the different settings, let me close by saying I encourage you to be thoughtful about the ramifications of changing any of the default settings. Microsoft knows what it’s doing with these settings, and while changing them a little bit is not a big deal, significant changes in sleep time or power button functionality might not be useful in the long run.
The problem Dave is that you’re discussing theory, but Windows 10, regardless of settings at least occasionally pops out of sleep mode. I will admit that it’s getting better but it’s still not fully reliable.