1

Does Windows 11 Pro ignore GPO power settings? I have some machines that seem to stay awake as they should, and then suddenly they revert to sleeping.

In my GPO I have sleep timeout (plugged in) and unattended sleep timeout (plugged in) both set to 0

Is this something with Modern Standby? Or just a GPO refresh issue? GPresult looks good, after I did a GPupdate. I didn’t check prior.

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2

Have you checked monitor/display settings, too? Are those set to go black/power off at specific intervals? If not, then they’re set to default values (10ish minutes?). If so, then you’ll need to change them.

3

I should have specified I’m attempting to remote in for admin reasons. I don’t mind if the display turns off, unless that is part of the problem. Display and sleep are different, at least they were on previous versions of Windows.

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4

They should be separate still, and thank you for clarifying. Since you just did the GP refresh and see in results that the policy is there, wait and see if it goes to sleep again. If it does, check the local machine’s power settings. Note that there are different power profiles and it’s possible that the logged in user is running on the wrong power profile.

5

Modern Standby is a newer sleep model that keeps the system in a low-power state while still allowing background activity (like network access). It can override traditional GPO power settings, especially on newer hardware.

In an elevated command prompt

powercfg /a

If you see something like Standby (S0 Low Power Idle) is available then Modern standby is active.

If it is and you want to disable it, you do so in the BIOS/UEFI, note that not all systems support disabling this, look for

  • “Modern Standby”
  • “S0 Low Power Idle”
  • “S3 Sleep Mode”
  • If available, disable S0 and enable S3.

If it can’t be disabled, you may be stuck.

Out of curiosity, what do you need to remote in for, that doesn’t require the user to be present. Is there another way you can solve whatever issue you’re facing?

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6

Today, the machine needed to be set up for a new user. The computer has likely been sitting idle for some time. (employee turnover) It was sleeping when I went to get on it. Someone in the office told me it was awake (maybe hit the mouse or keyboard), and between emails it went back to sleep.

Powercfg shows S0. But does S0 have its own timer or ignore the GPO? If sleep and idle sleep are both 0 mins, why is it sleeping? This is an HP and the power plan was HP Optimized (Modern Standby), but when I queried the settings they looked exactly the same as Balanced when I did a compare in Notepad++.

Machine is an HP Pro 400 Mini G9 - i5 13500T

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7

As posted, modern standby can override GPO settings.

Because modern standby can ignore GPO settings.

Switching from Modern Standby (S0) to S3 sleep is not officially supported on many HP systems, the best you’ve got is reaching out to HP and seeing if they have or will allow a custom BIOS to disable this. I expect your chances of this are fairly low though.

remotely connecting to a device to do this doesn’t sound too practical, isn’t there a more efficient way to automate this instead?
What specifically would you need to do, that by default the user can’t do when they first login?

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8

Curious, does Wake on LAN override S0 power??

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Beside being able to remote into a machine to check it out, there are also maintenance tasks that run in the off hours. I’d prefer that to happen when the user isn’t there, as opposed to when they wake up the machine. If the GPO tells the machine to stay on, I’d like it to stay on.

So, after a GPUpdate yesterday, the machine is now staying on. I don’t see any errors in the event log about the GPO not applying. I guess I need to dig into why the policy wasn’t applied until I forced it.

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10

WoL can work in S0, but only if the hardware, firmware (BIOS/UEFI), and OS all support it.

Windows 10/11 do support this, but not all hardware does. Especially aggressive power saving hardware.

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11

Back in Windows XP (clear up to Win7) days, we used a product called Magic Packet to power-on computers and servers that went offline. The only thing you had to do was ensure BIOS settings allowed it, and have the MAC for the NIC the machine was ‘listening’ on. It worked every time, 60% of the time!