How to keep computers from falling asleep during installation

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Annalisa Williams|Updated January 26, 2021
Keep Computers from Going to Sleep During Installation
Keep Computers from Going to Sleep During Installation

If you have an aggressive power savings plan, then you may have had issues with deployments failing due to a computer taking a nap mid-installation. Perhaps you have large install files that take a longer time to copy or install. While there are a few different ways to keep computers from going to sleep (GPO settings, WOL packets) let's cover an option for keeping computers awake during a particular deployment.

Keep computers from going to sleep

Meet Don't Sleep. Don't Sleep is a utility you can add to your deployments to keep computers from going to sleep. Run this as a command step before the rest of your package steps.

  1. Create a command step and add the Don't Sleep exe in the Files field.

  2. Add the following command:

Start "" DontSleep -bg enable=1 use_timer=1 set_timer=60

The parameter set_timer is in minutes so feel free to adjust that to whatever time you need a computer to stay on for. Click here to see the full list of parameters provided.

dont sleep package

That's it! Add additional steps after the first step to do whatever installation or maintenance your little heart desires. Alternatively, you could take an already existing package and add this step. Just make sure that you click and drag it up to the top so that it runs very first.

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Annalisa Williams

Annalisa was an employee at PDQ.

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