Sleep

If the Windows power management commands aren't working properly, you can use Sleep to not only make your PC enter sleeping mode, but also hibernate or reboot. It's a lightweight console tool that gets the job done by just writing a line of code.

The application needs no kind of installation, which means that you can fire up the downloaded .exe right away. Keep in mind that calling Sleep's process without entering any other options makes the workstation sleep immediately. In this case, you can press any key or click the mouse button to wake.

The syntax for the program is SLEEP [/f] [/h] [/nologo] [/nr] [/ns] [/r] [/w#]. For instance, you can make the PC enter hibernation mode instead of sleeping using /h. While hibernating, the computer doesn't consume RAM, so you can save power. To be able to wake up the PC, you have to press the power button.

Other switches can be used to force the machine to sleep, which comes in handy for forcefully terminating any running programs that may prevent the PC from completing this task.

By default, the tool reports the current power status in the console window. But you can disable this setting with /nr. You can also prevent entering sleep mode (/ns) while taking into account that the power status will be reported. Rebooting the PC is possible with /r. To set a delay time before the process terminated, you can use /w#.

Everything worked smoothly in our tests. Unsurprisingly, the tool used minimal system resources. Too bad that it hasn't received updates for a long time. Nevertheless, Sleep delivers a simple solution for making your workstation sleep, hibernate or restart from the command-line interface.