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So, I've been using Microsoft Security Essentials lately. And it usually takes a couple hours or more for it to full scan my hard drive. Because of that, I commonly leave it scanning while I go do something else. Problem is: 10 minutes later, windows 7 goes to sleep, and the scan is (obviously) paused. That's What I'd like to stop happening.

So far, the only way I've been able to avoid it was to create a power plan, and switch to it while away, to keep the PC from sleeping. Problem is that I have to keep switching power plans and I'd like the PC to be able to go to sleep in case MSE finishes scanning and I'm still not back.

Maybe I'm just asking for too much, but I've been surprised by the users here plenty of times already. So let me know if you know how to keep the PC from sleeping while MSE is scanning.

Thanks

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6 Answers 6

Reset to default
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The perfect solution would be if MSE could run some custom commands when it starts and some others after it finish, like it’s explained here for O&O.

But something tells me that it isn’t near that smart, so you might be able to make it smart by using the EventGhost’s Task Create/Switch Events plugin and combine the knowledge of powercfg command from previous post you could make it work.

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Insomnia is a free tool that prevent a machine from going to sleep

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    You have to manually close the window, so it’s not very helpful if you want to start a scan and go to bed and expect Windows to go to sleep on its own.
    – Synetech
    Aug 31, 2013 at 4:28
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have you tried keeping the scanning window maximized and not minimized/resized if not already?

I noticed that when watching movies not in fuill screen, it goes to sleep but if i go fullscreen, does not go to sleep. Funny thing is when the movie ends, it goes to sleep right away...

seems dumb suggestion, but perhaps it works the same way?

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    I noticed that when watching movies not in fuill screen, it goes to sleep but if i go fullscreen, does not go to sleep. Funny thing is when the movie ends, it goes to sleep right away... That’s just quirks of your media-player. A program has to call a specific function to disable power-management; the window state of a program has no bearing on whether Windows will sleep or not, at least not as far as Windows is concerned, a program could alter power-management based on its state if it wants (though that’s rare).
    – Synetech
    Aug 31, 2013 at 4:28
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Just a thought, but perhaps setting the priority higher through task manager (or other means) would help.

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  • How would that help? Are you assuming that they’ve got a bunch of other things running in the background, consuming CPU cycles? Even if for some reason that were true, it still wouldn’t guarantee that the scan finishes before the sleep timeout.
    – Synetech
    Aug 31, 2013 at 4:14
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I noticed that when µTorrent is running, Windows never goes to sleep.

So whenever I scan my PC, I simply open µTorrent.

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    That’s only because you happen to have active torrents and µTorrent set to prevent standby while torrents are active. If others have changed that setting or have no active torrents, then it won’t help. Of course you could create a dead torrent that will never finish, but they specifically asked for the block to be temporary and to let it sleep once the scan is finished. You could also try to run a torrent hat is expected to finish a little bit after the scan is done, but there is no practical way to set such a thing up to be anywhere close to reliable.
    – Synetech
    Aug 31, 2013 at 4:10
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you have to use the windows task scheduler to wake the computer to do a scan. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/protect/forum/mse-protect_start/running-mse-full-scan-as-a-scheduled-task/f627f5ce-0b74-4b1d-be64-d6ceeb4d9b02

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    It really would help to give more details to how, and why it would work.
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Aug 31, 2013 at 4:25

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