Awake

Sometimes, companies enforce policies that make computers enter sleep mode, hibernation or a lock screen after a short period of inactivity or at a specific time. This could be done to preserve power or for security purposes or for some other unknown reason. Still, one thing is certain: most employees hate these policies.

Such rules have a habit of interfering with one’s productivity. What’s worse is that an employee is usually unable to change these system settings because they don’t have any administrative privileges on their work computer. For this reason, apps have been developed to bypass such a policies. Awake is but one of them.

Awake is a lightweight, minimalistic and free tool that you can use to prevent your computer from automatically entering sleep mode, hibernation or the dreaded lock screen. It will reside in your system tray where it won’t bother you and its only interface is its context menu.

It doesn’t modify any of your system settings, but only resets your operating system’s idle timers. Thus, you can prevent your Windows from going to sleep for 15 minutes to two hours to forever. This is useful if you need to be away from your desk for some time or need run a program in the background without worrying about the computer going in standby mode.

You can activate Awake’s other useful feature by checking “Turn off the display (once)” in the context menu. This way, when you use the lock screen command (Win + L), the program will also turn off your monitor. This is a neat trick if you wish to keep any content away from unwanted eyes or, you know, pretend that your computer is turned off.

There are probably many applications that can already do what Awake does, but the fact that this one is so lightweight and unobtrusive could make it a worthy addition to your system tools collection.