A computer, fresh out of the box, has a default setting to put itself to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity. I prefer to keep computers alive so I can run maintenance scripts after hours without disturbing users. A handy command line tool is powercfg which can be used to set the power options. The easy command is “powercfg -change -standby-timeout-ac 00”. This tells the powercfg command to -change the -standby-timeout when on -ac power (DC would refer to a laptop running on battery) to 00 minutes.

-CHANGE, -X Modifies a setting value in the current power scheme.

              Usage: POWERCFG -X <SETTING> <VALUE>

              <SETTING>   Specifies one of the following options:
                          -monitor-timeout-ac <minutes>
                          -monitor-timeout-dc <minutes>
                          -disk-timeout-ac <minutes>
                          -disk-timeout-dc <minutes>
                          -standby-timeout-ac <minutes>
                          -standby-timeout-dc <minutes>
                          -hibernate-timeout-ac <minutes>
                          -hibernate-timeout-dc <minutes>

              Example:
                  POWERCFG -Change -monitor-timeout-ac 5

              This would set the monitor idle timeout value to 5 minutes
              when on AC power.