How do I prevent going to sleep with processes active?

What AV do you use? The reason I ask this is because some anti-virus has an option to automatically shutdown or sleep after a scan is finished.

Hi,

I think the tool that might help you here is powercfg. You access it from an elevanted CMD window.

If you type powercfg /? in the cmd window, it will list several usage options. The one I think might be able to help you is:

powercfg -requestoverride

I have never used it, but from the description it looks like you can use a service (for example a backup service or security service) to override the sleep state (i.e. it 'wakes' the computer when the service sends a signal to start).

Code:

 
  -REQUESTSOVERRIDE
              Sets a Power Request override for a particular Process, Service,
              or Driver. If no parameters are specified, this command displays
              the current list of Power Request Overrides.
              Usage: POWERCFG -REQUESTSOVERRIDE <CALLER_TYPE> <NAME> <REQUEST>
              <CALLER_TYPE>    Specifies one of the following caller type:
                               PROCESS, SERVICE, DRIVER. This is obtained by
                               calling the POWERCFG -REQUESTS command.
              <NAME>           Specifies the caller name. This is the name
                               returned from calling POWERCFG -REQUESTS command.
              <REQUEST>        Specifies one or more of the following Power
                               Request Types: Display, System, Awaymode.
              Example:
                  POWERCFG -REQUESTSOVERRIDE PROCESS wmplayer.exe Display System

I'll see if one of the more experienced users can confirm or deny this, or maybe make an alternative suggestion.

Regards,
Golden

JBDevon,

Here you are:
Give your computer insomnia [Free tool and source code to temporarily prevent a machine from going to sleep!] - Delay's Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

JB,
Would you:
| Administrative Tools | Task Scheduler | left-click on Task Scheduler Library | highlight the task in question (from the middle pane) | click on Export (right-hand pane) | Save button.

You will have saved a .xml file. Tack a .txt on to that file so that you can upload it and then upload the file.

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maxseven said:

You can thank MS for W7's incredibly aggressive power savings functionality, which doesn't seem to care what the CPU is doing and goes to sleep during any program operation. Any program, that is, which does not know the "Secret Handshake" to tell W7 to leave it the heck alone (somethng called STES iirc).

Actually, the "secret handshake" is publicly documented and a very easy-to-use API. It's probably best to lay the blame at a vendor's feet for not keeping a machine awake when it's doing something it thinks is of utmost importance, rather than blaming Microsoft's environment that has been this way since 2000 (at least). Also, other power state options are also well documented, so applications that "must" keep the system awake (and don't) are to blame in this case.

As to the OP's question, powercfg does provide the override function (as per Golden's post), which will allow a particular running process to keep a machine awake if the power plan attempts to sleep whilst that process is running. However, if the antivirus scan runs under the same process name as it's resident A/V (and not a separate process), creating an override for this process will keep the machine awake indefinitely.