Monitor Sleep Time Troubleshooting

Phillip Richcreek 1,125 Reputation points
2026-10-15T03:01:22.79+00:00

I had set the Monitor Sleep Time to 15 minutes and it was working fine. Today I noticed that the monitor was staying on for a lot more than 15 minutes. I went into Settings and set the sleep time to 3 minutes. The monitor didn't go OFF, even after a lot more than 3 minutes.
Monitor settings troubleshoot

I don't know anything that I did differently from what I had done previously.

Thanks for your help,

PR

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Settings
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  1. Hendrix-V 20,225 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator
    2026-10-15T07:28:06.6066667+00:00

    Hi Phillip Richcreek,

    Because the monitor remains on even after you reduced the timeout to 3 minutes, the next step I suggest is checking whether something is actively requesting that the display stay awake.

    • Open Command Prompt as Administrator and run: powercfg /requests
    • If something appears under DISPLAY, temporarily close that application or disconnect the associated device, then test again.

    If you'd like, please share the command output here and we can use it to narrow down the cause.

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  2. Ivan B 125.3K Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2026-10-15T03:39:54.0733333+00:00

    Hi,

    Go to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options and check the "Choose when to turn off the display" setting.

    Check if the 3-minute setting is applied.

    If that doesn't work, click "Change plan settings" for the Balanced plan, then "Change advanced power settings" > Display > "Turn off display after."

    If that still doesn't work, perform a clean boot just to ensure that third-party software isn't interfering.

    Then perform a clean boot:

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-execute-a-simple-boot-start-in-windows-da2f9573-6eec-00ad-2f8a-a97a1807f3dd

    Please consider rating the question (accepting the answer or not) and visiting the Microsoft Q&A community if you have further questions.

    Thanks.

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