How to sleep

You can use the powercfg command in Command Prompt to configure Windows 10 to automatically go to sleep after a specified period of inactivity. This is different from starting a one-time countdown that puts the PC to sleep at a particular time.

Open Command Prompt as administrator by opening Start, typing cmd, right-clicking Command Prompt, and selecting Run as administrator.

To set the sleep timeout when the PC is plugged into AC power, use:

powercfg /change standby-timeout-ac <minutes>

For example, to make Windows sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity:

powercfg /change standby-timeout-ac 30

If the computer is running on battery power, use:

powercfg /change standby-timeout-dc <minutes>

For example:

powercfg /change standby-timeout-dc 30

A value of 0 means that Windows will never automatically go to sleep for that power mode.

If, instead, you want to start a countdown and have the PC sleep after a specific amount of time, Windows does not have a native single command equivalent to shutdown -s -t for sleep. You can combine the timeout command with a sleep command. For example, to wait 30 minutes and then put the PC to sleep:

timeout /t 1800 /nobreak && rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState 0,1,0

Here, 1800 represents 1,800 seconds, or 30 minutes. You can substitute whatever number of seconds you want. For example, 10 minutes is 600 seconds:

timeout /t 600 /nobreak && rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState 0,1,0

There is a caveat with rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState - its behavior can be affected by whether hibernation is enabled. A commonly used variation is:

timeout /t 1800 /nobreak && powercfg -h off && rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState 0,1,0

powercfg -h off disables hibernation and changes the system's hibernation configuration, so I would not use that to create a temporary sleep countdown unless you specifically want hibernation disabled.

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hth

Marcin