Windows 8 refuses to stay awake

[TBugReporter]

Amazing... I searched for "sleep" here and found the "Windows 8.1 refuses to sleep" thread, which is still going strong after almost 800 posts, talking about the exact opposite problem to the one I'm having! (Now, needless to say, I haven't read the entirety of that thread - yet; could someone boil it down to the essentials?)

I'm trying to configure my computer so that it never sleeps, hibernates, or shuts down unless I specifically ask it to - or if it's so starved for energy that shutting down is the only way to ensure that nothing gets damaged. The machine is never unplugged, so it should never have any reason to shut down, short of a power failure. I've had problems with this intermittently since I got this computer, and I thought I had it fixed, but last week the problem started again. The attached file is a full transcript of the Power Options Control Panel; as you can tell by how long I spent making this transcript, I've been trying to track this down for quite a while. View attachment Power Panel (8.1).txt

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[David Bailey]

Perhaps:

**************************************
Hard disk
Turn off hard disk after
On battery: 10 Minutes>>>>>NEVER
Plugged in: 20 Minutes>>>>>NEVER
**************************************

************************************************
Sleep
Sleep after
On battery: 20 Minutes>>>>>NEVER
Plugged in: Never
************************************************

You can change them back if they don't help.
You could disable hibernation too, as a test.

 

[TBugReporter]

I'm not sure how those settings could be causing the problem, but at this point, I'm willing to try anything, so I'll make those changes later today (once I stop using the machine in question) and see if they help.

 

[TBugReporter]

So far, so good; I left it on last night and it was still on this morning - but that might just mean that whatever's making it turn off didn't happen last night.

 

[TBugReporter]

It happened again. When I got to the computer today, the screen was off. I'm not sure if this is significant, but yesterday, I had some time to kill and tried fooling around with some TIFKAM games - and IIRC, the day I downloaded them was the day before I started this thread. Coincidence?

 

[ewtaylo]

I don't see in your initial post how you know that the machine is sleeping. Is it possible that the monitor has a low power mode that is entered after a certain time? Did you verify that the machine is actually sleeping via the event viewer, Kernel-Power event 42 and/or Power-Troubleshooter event 1?

 

[TBugReporter]

It's happening again. This time, I suspect that a Windows Update may have something to do with it, because we have several identical computers that were bought at the same time and it started happening to all of them more or less simultaneously.

I don't see in your initial post how you know that the machine is sleeping. [...] Did you verify that the machine is actually sleeping via the event viewer, Kernel-Power event 42 and/or Power-Troubleshooter event 1?

I apologize for not noticing your post until now. I didn't look too thoroughly before, but I did find event 42 in the logs this time:

The system is entering sleep.

Sleep Reason: System Idle

(Real helpful message, guys. Yeah, I know the system's idle; what I need to know is: why do you care, when I've been doing everything I can in the past months to get you to stop caring?)

Is it possible that the monitor has a low power mode that is entered after a certain time?

Even if that had turned out to be true, the behaviour is still unwanted, and I don't see why the settings in the Power Control Panel are insufficient to control it. I went thru the power controls again and verified that they are set exactly as documented in my original post, so whatever changed yesterday appears to be non-configurable by the user - at least by normal means. OTOH, they must get changed in some other indirect way, since in past instances, the problem has disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared.

 

[Wynona]

I'm trying to configure my computer so that it never sleeps, hibernates, or shuts down unless I specifically ask it to - or if it's so starved for energy that shutting down is the only way to ensure that nothing gets damaged. The machine is never unplugged, so it should never have any reason to shut down, short of a power failure. I've had problems with this intermittently since I got this computer, and I thought I had it fixed, but last week the problem started again. The attached file is a full transcript of the Power Options Control Panel; as you can tell by how long I spent making this transcript, I've been trying to track this down for quite a while.

Any help would be appreciated.

Since you haven't included anything but Windows 8 in your system specs, I don't know if your computer is a laptop or a desktop. With that said, have you been to the Power Options in the Control Panel?

If it's a desktop, this might be helpful. Click on the graphic to enlarge.



You should pay attention to "Choose when to turn off the display" and "Change when the computer sleeps". I think it's self-explanatory from there.

 

[caperjack]

Wynona, I don't think you would get the on battery setting if it was a desktop tower ,I know I don't