Troubleshooting

Most likely cause: A group policy or third-party power management tool is overriding the system-level wake lock that SmartSleep sets.

1. Open Settings → System → Power & sleep and confirm the sleep timeout is not set to a very short value at the OS level.
2. Check whether your device is managed by an employer or institution — Group Policy sleep enforcement cannot be overridden by a user-space application.
3. Confirm no other power management software (Dell Power Manager, Lenovo Vantage, HP Command Center) is running with competing policies.
4. Try toggling the wake state off and back on in SmartSleep while watching Task Manager to confirm the process is still running.

SmartSleep uses the Windows SetThreadExecutionState API to prevent sleep — the same mechanism used by PowerToys Awake and Caffeine. If they also fail to prevent sleep on your device, the cause is above the application layer.

Battery percentage frozen: SmartSleep reads battery data from the Windows power API on a polling interval. If the percentage is frozen, close and reopen the app — it may have resumed from a suspended state.

Drain rate shows 0%/hr: The drain rate requires a short sampling window to calculate. If SmartSleep was just opened, wait 30–60 seconds for the rate to populate. Rate also reads as 0 when plugged in and not actively charging.

Incorrect charging state: If your machine shows "Plugged in" but the power adapter is removed, or vice versa, the Windows battery driver may need a reset:

1. Open Device Manager → Batteries.
2. Right-click Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery and choose Uninstall device.
3. Restart your PC — Windows will reinstall the driver automatically.

Most likely cause: The autostart registration requires write access to the Windows registry. If SmartSleep was not run with sufficient permissions when the toggle was set, the entry may not have been written.

1. Right-click the SmartSleep executable and choose Run as administrator.
2. Toggle Start with Windows off, then back on.
3. Restart and confirm SmartSleep launches in the tray.

You can verify the registration manually by opening Task Manager → Startup apps and looking for SmartSleep in the list.

Alternative: If the toggle continues to fail, manually add SmartSleep to your Startup folder: press Win + R, type shell:startup, and paste a shortcut to the SmartSleep executable in that folder.

High-drain alerts trigger when battery drain rate exceeds a threshold and a single process is identified as the primary contributor. There are a few reasons an alert may not appear:

• Load is distributed: If drain is spread across multiple processes with no single dominant consumer, SmartSleep does not trigger a named alert.
• Drain rate is within normal range: The threshold is set conservatively to avoid false positives during legitimate heavy workloads like video rendering or compilation.
• Machine is plugged in: Drain alerts only fire on battery power.
• App was just opened: SmartSleep needs a short sampling period (approximately 60 seconds) to establish a baseline before alerts can fire.

If you believe a process is consuming excess power, open Task Manager and sort the Power usage column to identify it directly.

1. Click the ⌃ (up arrow) in the bottom-right taskbar corner to expand hidden tray icons — SmartSleep may be collapsed there.
2. To pin it to the visible tray, click and drag the SmartSleep icon out to the main tray area.
3. If the icon is not in the hidden area either, the tray registration may have failed. Close SmartSleep via Task Manager and relaunch it.

Tray icon visibility can also be managed through Settings → Personalization → Taskbar → Other system tray icons on Windows 11.

This is expected behavior for new apps that haven't yet accumulated broad download history with Microsoft's reputation system. SmartSleep is safe to run.

1. Click More info on the SmartScreen dialog.
2. Click Run anyway.

If you want to verify the executable before running it, you can scan it via VirusTotal. As download volume grows, the SmartScreen prompt will stop appearing automatically.