Power management is a good thing. It’ll save you a few pennies per month on electricity and help prevent wear and tear on your computer. Now, if we could just get Vista to sleep properly. One of the most common culprits is the Disk Cleanup Tool. For some reason, it can disable both the Hybrid Sleep and Hybrid Hibernation features. To enable the hibernation and hybrid sleep feature, do the following:
- Click Start, click All Programs, and then click Accessories.
- Right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.
- If you are prompted for an administrator password or for confirmation, type the password or click Continue.
- Type powercfg -h on, and then press ENTER.
Also a common problem, a device might be “waking up” the machine before it has a chance to sleep. This most notably happens with USB devices, but can happen even if there are no devices present, as the USB controller polls for devices. To remedy this:
- Click Start , type power options in the Start Search box, and then click Power Options in the Programs list.
- If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type your password or click Continue.
- Under the selected power plan, click Change plan settings.
- Click Change advanced power settings.
- In the Power Options dialog box, expand USB settings, and then expand USB selective suspend setting.
- click Enabled in the On battery list, and then click OK.
Yet a another common problem is in the power options, under multimedia settings. This gives you the option to not let the computer sleep while sharing media files.
- Type ‘power options’ in the start menu and press enter.
- Select ‘Balanced’, or the power plan that you are using.
- Click ‘Change plan settings’ (for the chosen power plan).
- Click ‘Change advanced power settings’.
- Scroll down and expand ‘Multimedia settings’
- Expand ‘When Sharing Media’
- In the drop down list, select choose ‘Allow the computer to sleep’