Local Windows utility
Stay Awake
Three ways to keep a machine from going quiet, and you choose which one you need. The honest default touches no input at all — it just tells Windows the machine is in use. The other two exist because plenty of things watch for a keystroke rather than the power state.
Windows 10/11 (x64) · Free · No account
Nothing is written to disk. Stay Awake either holds a power-state request open or sends a tiny amount of input, depending on the strategy you pick.
What it's for
Real jobs — Stay Awake
Not feature bullets — the actual situations people go looking for this in the first place.
- Stopping the screen locking during a long download, render or install.
- Keeping a status light from going amber while you are reading rather than typing.
- Sitting through a session that disconnects after twenty minutes of no input.
- Presenting from a laptop that decides mid-slide that nobody is there.
What it does
Everything Stay Awake handles
Everything below runs on your own machine, driven by one hotkey, for as long as you leave it running.
Power-state blocking, the honest default
Asks Windows to keep the machine awake, the same way a media player does while a film is running. No synthetic input at all — nothing is typed, nothing moves.
Micro-move
A one-pixel cursor nudge and back, on an interval, for idle detectors that watch the mouse rather than the power state.
Keep-alive pulse
A harmless F15 or Scroll Lock press on an interval, for session timeouts that only reset on a real key event. Neither key does anything in a normal application.
An interval you control
Anything from one second to one hour. The shipped anti-disconnect preset uses ten minutes against a twenty-minute idle kick — half the window, so the pulse never races the timeout.
Stops the moment you say
One hotkey, or the Stop item on the tray menu. The power-state request is released rather than left dangling, so the machine sleeps normally again.
Varied pulse timing
The interval can vary slightly rather than firing on the exact second, for anything that treats a perfectly regular heartbeat as a heartbeat.
How it works
From setup to hotkey
- 1
Try the power strategy first
It is the default, it sends no input, and it solves sleep, the screensaver and the idle lock. If your problem is one of those three, you are finished here.
- 2
Move up only if you need to
If something is watching for input rather than power state, switch to micro-move. If it needs a key event specifically, switch to the keep-alive pulse.
- 3
Set the interval
Between one second and one hour. For a known timeout, use roughly half of it so a pulse never lands at the boundary.
- 4
Start it and forget it
It runs from the tray with a badge on the icon. Stop it from the hotkey or the tray menu, and the machine goes back to its normal sleep behaviour immediately.
Under the hood
The mechanics, named
The mechanics, named plainly — no mystery boxes.
- Power strategy
- Electron powerSaveBlocker — SetThreadExecutionState, no synthetic input
- Micro-move
- robotjs 0.9.1 — 1 px cursor nudge and return
- Keep-alive
- robotjs 0.9.1 — F15 or Scroll Lock down/up
- Interval
- 1 second to 1 hour
- Default
- Power strategy — it is the one that touches nothing
- Platform
- Windows 10/11 (x64) — runs fully on your machine
None of the three can override a policy your IT department has set, and none of them makes a machine look occupied to a human. Keeping a status indicator green is a presence signal, not a claim about what you are doing.
Questions
Stay Awake, answered
Get the whole tray — Stay Awake
Stay Awake comes with ClickTray — free for Windows 10 and 11, with the other three alongside it.
Windows 10/11 (x64) · Free · No account