Windows 10, Group Policy and Power Saving

Question

This is driving me nuts

I have a group policy set to make the display turn off after 20 mins. I have go to sleep set to DISABLED. I've checked with GPResult and can see the policy has applied correctly. I can see in Control Panel that SLEEP is DISABLED. Yet I sit and time it takes for the lockscreen to appear and this is 5 minutes. Where is this set? There is no policy set for this, then 10 seconds later the laptop goes to sleep.

We have 4 Dell 7370 where this behaviour causes those laptops to crash when they hit sleep, again, despite sleep being DISABLED. We have Lenovo ThinkPad T15s that are going to sleep and come out of it fine, but why are they going to sleep? They are on power and again, the sleep option is DISABLED.

I've been reading this could be Modern Standby mode but there appears to be no option to disable this other than a reg setting. That worked in setting Standby to S3 mode but it makes no difference, the screenlock still kicks in after 5mins and roughly 10 seconds later the laptop goes to sleep.

This is obviously a setting in Windows 10 that appears to be hidden on broken as this issue didn't exists in Windows 7.

I'm on Windows 10 build 1909. Other Windows 10 builds we have are 1809 and they have the same issue.

Any ideas to stop this forced sleep, its driving me nuts and we don't want it. All we want is the display to turn off but the laptop to stay on and not sleep.

Answer 1

Its is no 26th April and this is FINALLY resolved! I hate when they bury settings. WHY? WHY DO IT!!!!

It turned out to be the settings for the lockscreen that aren't available until you make a registry change!

Go to

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\7516b95f-f776-4464-8c53-06167f40cc99\8EC4B3A5-6868-48c2-BE75-4F3044BE88A7

Change:

Attributes 1

to

Attributes 2

Then click on go to power options in control panel/Change Plan Settings/Change advanced power settings/

Scroll down to display. You'll now have an extra option called "Console lock display off timeout"

Despite mine being set to 1min for both, the lock screen times out after 30 seconds. Changed to a longer time and no longer putting the laptop to sleep after 30seconds!

FINALLY!

Again, WHY BURY THE OPTION, its nuts.

Answer 2

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\7516b95f-f776-4464-8c53-06167f40cc99\8EC4B3A5-6868-48c2-BE75-4F3044BE88A7]
"Attributes"=dword:00000002

You can find the option to set the timer in the advanced power options for the computer

I think this is what you are looking for.

Answer 3

Hello @Steven Whiting ,

Thank you for posting here.

1.Based on "I have a group policy set to make the display turn off after 20 mins.", would you please tell us what group policy setting we configured?

Computer Configuration - Preferences - Control Panel Settings - Power Options
OR
User Configuration - Preferences - Control Panel Settings - Power Options

2.How do you configured this group policy setting?

3.Based on the description "I have go to sleep set to DISABLED", do you disable the sleep through the same domain GPO? If so, how do you configured this group policy setting?

Do you mean "sleep set to DISABLED" as "sleep set to Never"?

4.Are all the problematic machines we mentioned in the same OU with the GPO (display turn off after) applied?

Not sure whether the this behaviour (the screenlock still kicks in after 5mins and roughly 10 seconds later the laptop goes to sleep) is caused by the the GPO (display turn off after), we can remove the GPO setting from one problematic machine to see if this behaviour persists.

Best REgards,
Daisy Zhou

Answer 4

Thanks for the reply.

I see you've picked a different area on the policy, I wonder if that is it. This is where are is set

User Config\Admin Template\Control Panel\Personalization

In this setting, I'm trying to fool Windows into running the screensaver 20mins later. But its not working. Taking my laptop as an example, its still going to the lockscreen after 5mins and I can't find any setting in group policy where the lockscreen is set. And then 30 seconds after the lockscreen my laptop goes to sleep.

The server is 2012 R2 (not sure if that's related).

And then we have another policy that is applied to Computers

What we want is the laptop to go to the lockscreen and stay there and only turn the screen off after, lets say 5 mins (the 20mins is in the policy to see if it actually takes effect) but instead the laptops go to sleep. I also have yet to find where you the lockscreen policy is.

We have no policy set in the screenshot you've shown. I wonder if that could be it.

But, in control panel, again on my laptop, we see the following:

So you can see, in this section with the power plugged in, its set to no go to sleep.

Answer 5

Finally found the 5mins timeout setting. It turned out to have its very own policy in our list of policies.

For anyone else it is under

Computer Config\Polices\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options

Interactive logon: Machine Inactivity Limit.

Still trying to work out why the sleep is kicking in after 30 seconds of the lockscreen.