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my monitor stopped turning off after 15 minutes of non use
about 3 or 4 weeks ago my monitor that had always turned off after 15 minutes of non use stopped turning off. The screen save also will not come on. The only thing i did that may be related, i changed to one of the built in windows slide shows for my background. I have tried to go back to just a plain background that came with windows but my monitors still do not shut down unless i turn them off. the screen saver also will not come on unless i do a preview. Thanks
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Answer
Hi phich_78,
a) When you mention monitor turn off, do you mean monitor does not go to sleep?
There are a few ways you can try to solve this unable to sleep problem in Windows 7. Go through all the steps below.
Method 1 – Update Drivers
The very first thing you want to do if Windows 7 is not going to sleep is to update all the drivers, especially for your video card. You can either run Windows update or go to the website for your hardware manufacturer and download them there. I would
recommend the latter.
Method 2 – Configure Power Option Settings
If that didn’t work for you, the next thing to do is to make sure your Power settings are configured properly.
First, click Start, then type power sleep in the search box and click on Change when the computer sleeps.
Now, change the value of Put the computer to sleep to something new like 15 minutes or 30 minutes, but do NOT set it to Never.
Next click on the Change advanced power settings link at the bottom. Go ahead and expand Sleep and then expand Allow waker timers. Make sure this is set to Disable.
Scroll more and expand Multimedia settings, then expand When sharing media, and select Allow the computer to sleep.
windows 7 sleep
Method 3 – Disable wake up computer devices
If the first two methods didn’t work, your issue might be caused by devices that automatically wake up your computer. You can try disabling the devices that might be waking your computer.
Click on Start, type CMD and then right-click on CMD and choose Run as administrator.
Now type the following command which will list out all the devices that can wake up your Windows 7 computer.
Powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
Now you can disable a device by typing in the following command and replacing devicename with the name of the device listed previously:
Powercfg -devicedisablewake “devicename“
You can also prevent the devices from waking a Windows 7 computer using Device Manager. Go to the Control Panel, click on Hardware and Sound and then click on Device Manager.
Expand the device you want to disable and right-click on it and choose Properties.
Click on the Power Management tab and uncheck the Allow this device to wake the computer box.
allow device to wake the computer
Hope this helps
Azeez Nadeem - Microsoft Support
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