Use Command Prompt to Put a Windows Computer to Sleep

Are you missing the “Sleep” shortcut on your Windows computer? Here is an easy way to put your computer to “sleep” using the Command Prompt.

Especially for laptops, “Sleep” is a good standby mode when you are not using the system for quite some time. It saves battery and also keeps the system cool, while keeping it just enough active that whenever you hit a key, everything comes back to life again. But, sometimes, the graphical menu option to put your system to sleep may disappear and become hard to find.

Here is a quick fire and sure way to get your computer to sleep using the Command Prompt. Don’t worry, these set of commands are not rocket science and anyone who can point and click or copy/paste their way through Windows can easily do this.

Pre-requisites

Before you go ahead and especially if you are on a laptop (i.e., not a desktop PC), you need to turn off your computer’s “Hibernation” mode. Otherwise, when you use the command to put it to sleep, your laptop may go into “Hibernate”, which is not what you want.

Open an Administration Command Prompt. The simple way in any Windows Operating System is to hit the “WINDOWS” key once and start typing “CMD”. Right click on the “Command Prompt” item that is displayed and select “Run as Administrator”. Accept the elevation when prompted. Note that if you are using Windows 8 or above, you will need to be in the “Tiles” desktop and not the good old icons and start menu desktop for this to work. Anyway, once you have your administration Command Prompt, go ahead and run the below command (this will turn off the hibernation option, you can re-enable it again anytime):

C:\> POWERCFG /HIBERNATE OFF

If you do a “ON” instead of the “OFF” in the command above, it will turn hibernation back ON.

NOTE: You do not need to repeat this command the next time unless you have turned hibernation back on in between.

Put It To Sleep Now

If you want to immediately sleep your system, still in the Administration Command Prompt, run this:

C:\> RUNDLL32.EXE powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState 0,1,0

Remember not to add any extra spaces other than what is shown above (copy paste it if you need). Your system will go to sleep IMMEDIATELY on running the above command.

Set Up A Shortcut

To repeat the process any time, set up a shortcut on your desktop.

1. Right-click in any blank area of your desktop
2. Choose New > Shortcut
3. Copy/paste the above command (“RUNDLL ….. 0,1,0”)
4. Click Next
5. For the name of the shortcut, enter “Put to Sleep Immediately”
6. Click Finish

That’s it. Now anytime you need to, simply double click on this icon and your computer will instantly sleep.