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Think of this as phone support for a user with little experience. How can I tell them, without diagrams or esoteric command-line structures, how to find this info for themselves.

There are several questions on here where people have gone to intricate methods to discover what process is preventing their computer from sleeping.
Many of these date back to old Windows versions & none seem to have a simple, comprehensive method.

I'm used to macOS, where I can simply open Activity Monitor - which is the Mac equivalent of Task Manager - & add a column, "Preventing sleep"
As you can see from this picture, I have a 24-hour surveillance camera running, so the app & as a consequence hidd [hardware interfaces process] jointly are keeping me awake - to be expected.

enter image description here

Is there a simple Windows built-in equivalent?

I'm not interested in 3rd party tools unless it's one of those 'everybody should have' tools I simply haven't yet discovered, so this is not a product request, it's a "does this functionality exist in Windows?" request.

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  • 2
    try powercfg /requests ... powercfg -requests also works
    – jsotola
    Commented Aug 8, 2020 at 17:08
  • @jsotola , powercfg is only going to show you devices that were keeping the machine awake, not what process was using that device. For instance, With powercfg, I would be able to see that the sound card was the culprit but I can't see what process was accessing it at the time. Is that not true?
    – Señor CMasMas
    Commented Aug 8, 2020 at 17:21
  • @SeñorCMasMas: Processes are listed, with notes such as "playing audio" -- so that's the process causing the sound card to be in a no-sleep state.
    – Ben Voigt
    Commented Apr 21 at 3:17

1 Answer 1

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How to view apps preventing sleep on Windows 10

enter image description here

Understanding results

The results aren’t presented in the most user-friendly format; such is the nature of information you’ll get from command-line tools. That said, here’s a simple breakdown of the information you might see.

  • Display: This will show processes that have taken over the display e.g. an app in full-screen mode. This could be a media player like the Movies & TV app, or it could be presentation software like PowerPoint. It could also be a screen recording tool like OBS.
  • System: This will show system processes though the system processes may be invoked by other apps that are running. For example, if an audio stream is playing, the audio driver will be in use and will appear to be preventing the system from entering sleep. You will normally be able to see which apps are using the audio device on your system so quitting it shouldn’t be too hard.
  • Awaymode: This will show apps exclusively. It’s a command that apps send to Windows 10 telling it to keep the system awake. Apps can programmatically do this.

What is "Windows Remediation Service" and how do I disable it?

A few days ago I noticed that my PC no longer goes to sleep based on inactivity (although I can manually put it to sleep). Today I ran "powercfg -requests" and saw

EXECUTION:
[PROCESS] \Device\HarddiskVolume2\Program Files\rempl\sedlauncher.exe
SleepDeferralConditionsMet

PERFBOOST:
[PROCESS] \Device\HarddiskVolume2\Program Files\rempl\sedlauncher.exe
SleepDeferralConditionsMet

Sedlauncher is apparently part of Windows Remediation Service and, from scattered reports on the web, think it may have been part of KB4023057 that I installed about 2 weeks ago.

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