Windows 11 not putting monitors to sleep after the set amount of time

Hi,

I recently bought a QD-OLED monitor to use as my main monitor with 2 regular monitors on the sides of it. It’s my first OLED monitor and so to make sure I don’t have burn in issues I set Windows 11 to put the monitors to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity. Note: I did not set the whole PC to go to sleep, only the monitors.

But I’m having an issue. The monitors seem to take longer than the specified amount of time to go to sleep. For example I just timed it and from the moment I stopped using the mouse and keyboard it took 22 minutes for the monitors to go to sleep rather than the set 15 minutes. It seems to always take a random amount of extra time for the monitors to go to sleep.

However when I set Windows to put the monitors to sleep after just 1 minute for testing purposes it usually works fine. But as soon as I set it back to like 10 or 15 minutes it takes longer again.

I did do some googling and ran the command “powercfg /requests” in an admin terminal and this was the output

I’m not sure if one of those things under the System section or Discord may be causing it to not work properly? But I would’ve thought if one of those were the issue then the monitors would never go to sleep rather than the issue I’m having.

The other thing I’ve done is disable Nvidia High Defintion Audio in device manager cause that was completely preventing the monitors from going to sleep.

Hoping someone can help me figure this out! TIA

there maybe background processes running at the 15 minute marker
thereby preventing the monitor from going to sleep

these could be system maintenance tasks to program updates
when they have completed then the monitor will sleep

you can set it to just switch the display off instead of sleep
which would allow any task to complete but the screen would be off

you could also set the power button to turn the display off manually.

best of luck Steve ..

That's interesting what you say. I have the same problem on my Windows 7 computer. I work in parallel with Windows 7 on one computer and Windows 11 on another. On both, the time is set to 15 minutes. However, the Windows 7 computer sometimes takes longer. As @XxXxX says, it's very possible that this delay is due to some process or whatever is running in the background.

XxXxX said:

there maybe background processes running at the 15 minute marker
thereby preventing the monitor from going to sleep

these could be system maintenance tasks to program updates
when they have completed then the monitor will sleep

you can set it to just switch the display off instead of sleep
which would allow any task to complete but the screen would be off

you could also set the power button to turn the display off manually.

best of luck Steve ..

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply! Not entirely sure what you mean about turning off the display. As far as I know Windows is only capable of putting the monitors to sleep.

Plus I kind of need it to go to sleep rather than turning off because the QD-OLED monitor (Alienware AW2725D) likes to have a pixel refresh at a minimum of every 4 hours of being used. To do this I have to either manually initiate the pixel refresh through the monitor’s OSD or it will automatically do it when the monitor goes into sleep/standby. It won’t have any way of doing it if the monitor is turned off completely.

settings > system > power
in this window > power & sleep button controls
on the drop down menu should be a setting for 'display off'

best of luck Steve ..