Microsoft has a new PowerToys tool to keep your PC awake

Have you ever left your PC running a task only to find that it went to sleep while you were gone? It can happen sometimes. For example, if you’ve used DaVinci Resolve, you may have found that your PC can go to sleep while exporting a video. Thankfully, someone at Microsoft has acknowledged that problem, and now there’s a solution. The company has recently updated its PowerToys tool to keep your PC awake as long as need.

Simply called Awake, this tool does exactly what it sets out to do. Once you enable it, you can set it to keep your PC awake indefinitely or set a timer for it to go to sleep again. The tool is similar to caffeinate, which is a command line tool for macOS.

That may sound a bit redundant for some, because Windows already lets you set when your PC should go to sleep. However, that means changing your power plan settings, which are persistent. You may need to keep your PC awake for a specific task, instead of making it a recurring thing. If you tend to leave your PC idle, this can use a lot more power than needed since your PC will be awake a lot longer. With PowerToys Awake, you can keep your PC awake just one time until you enable it again.

That’s the biggest addition of version 0.41 of PowerToys, but the other tools in the suite have also received tons of fixes and improvements. FancyZones, which lets you create custom layouts for your desktop windows, now has full keyboard support, for example.

PowerToys includes a number of tools including a system-wide color picker, an image resizer, and a quick launch tool. You can also use it to remap keyboard shortcuts, and rename multiple files at once. It’s mostly a tool for advanced users, and it lets you make Windows a bit more tailored to your preference. But there’s also a shortcut guide that might be more useful for beginners. it lets you see all the Windows shortcuts that can be activated with the Windows key.

If you haven’t yet, you can download PowerToys from the GitHub releases page. It’s also an open-source project, so you can help shape it. Seeing as Microsoft has added tools like Power Automate to Windows 11, it wouldn’t be surprising if PowerToys was eventually added, too.

The post Microsoft has a new PowerToys tool to keep your PC awake appeared first on xda-developers.

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