Solved My PC Gets Sleepy between 3 and 4 Minutes of No Action

It doesn't fall asleep. I have it set to turn the display off at 10 minutes, and to go into sleep mode at 15. That works perfectly!

But you know how when your PC is starting up or waking up, and when the cursor first displays, it works intermittently? You can try to move it around, and it doesn't react very well. Not until your PC is fully awake.

This happens every time I don't touch my keyboard or mouse for between 3 and 4 minutes. Then it takes about 20 seconds to fully wake up after I touch the keyboard or mouse. Drives me nuts!

I don't have any unusual or unknown programs on my PC, and I don't believe it's malware. Otherwise my PC runs great. Fast. But this has been a nuisance for months.

Thank you, Peter

Maybe allow computer to put USB to sleep settings? CPU minimum/idle setting? Just taking a few stabs here.

Thanks, but I don't know what you mean or how to do it.

I did try this:

Control Panel > Power Options > When to turn off the display > Change advanced power settings > USB settings > USB selective suspend setting > Disable

But that didn't do anything.

I also did a test with Notepad running, and when it got "sleepy" I couldn't type normally, either, so it's not just the mouse that gets groggy.

I've also watched the Task Manager while it goes into this mode and nothing much happens. It's usually running System at 14% of the CPU and that may double.

After 6 months of great frustration, someone told me how to solve my problem.

I went into Windows Explorer, and right-clicked on my C drive to get a Properties pop-up. At the bottom of the pop-up is the checkbox: Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties

Evidently after sitting for a few minutes, this indexing would start hogging resources and making use of my computer impossible. Then after moving the mouse or typing something, it would take maybe 30-40 seconds to fully wake up again, as if it had been in sleep mode.

I don't really understand all this technically, but I'm thrilled it's fixed!

Peter

P.S.

I tried re-checking the box and sure enough the problem came back, then went away when I unchecked it again.