Win 11 closes my session overnight despite sleep settings set to "never"

Hi everybody. I have a desktop PC.

Here are my current power and screen saver settings (in french, but I'm sure you can understand ):





As you can see, after 6 minutes idling, the screen saver kicks in, without ever leaving the session.
After 15 minutes the screen turns off. But the computer supposedly never goes to sleep.

At least that's what I thought. Yesterday I left it on for the night, and today I was surprised to see that my whole session had been closed! I was directly at the logon screen. after entering my password, my session opened again: all my startup apps had to load again, and Win 11 opened again both my browsers, which I had left open on purpose. But Win 11 didn't even open them well: when I left for the night they both were fullscreen (but minimized in the taskbar) and Win 11 opened them in windowed mode (so I had to click on the enlarge window button for each of them).

It all was quite annoying, and I'd like to prevent this from happening again if possible.
So how can I make sure that Win 11 never leaves the current session without me explicitly telling it to do so?

Thanks in advance!

Have you configured never to sleep state at your chosen power plan mode from Power options, make sure battery and power cable connections are set to never.

Please explain how to reach those options you talk about. I thought my screenshots were all possible options. Thank you.

From "Control Panel --> Power Options" select the power plan you configured for your computer and set the Sleep to Never.

A screenshot of power configuration would be helpful. English helps too
From cmd prompt as admin powercfg -a

FreeBooter said:

From "Control Panel --> Power Options" select the power plan you configured for your computer and set the Sleep to Never.

Click to expand...

That's exactly what my first screenshot is about.
"Mettre l'ordinateur en veille" means "Set the computer to sleep" and "Jamais" means "Never".

glasskuter said:

A screenshot of power configuration would be helpful. English helps too
From cmd prompt as admin powercfg -a

Click to expand...

There you go (translation below):



Translation :

• S3 and hibernation are supported.
• S0, S1 and S2 are not supported.
• Hybrid sleep is not supported.
• Fast Startup is disabled.

Check to see if you have lated UEFI bios.

I have latest UEFI BIOS : ASUS v2214 for my B650M motherboard.

Tonight I went out. Left my PC at 21:20, came back at 0:50. That makes 3h30.
I pressed Esc and I went straight into my session, everything was OK.

So whatever happened last night, happened after 3h30 of idle time apparently.
I'm going to try tonight and see what happens tomorrow morning.

Jose Hidalgo said:

I have latest UEFI BIOS : ASUS v2214 for my B650M motherboard.

Tonight I went out. Left my PC at 21:20, came back at 0:50. That makes 3h30.
I pressed Esc and I went straight into my session, everything was OK.

So whatever happened last night, happened after 3h30 of idle time apparently.
I'm going to try tonight and see what happens tomorrow morning.

Click to expand...

Take a look at the Windows Event Viewer, navigate to Windows Logs > System. Locate the time period just prior to when you brought the system back up. Check to see if there is any event indicating a problem. What I would expect most likely to find is an event possibly indicating that the system lost power unexpectedly.

I think I may have found what just happened.
Turns out that during the night, Windows tried to perform some system updates.



Could it be that one of the updates required a reboot?
But if that was the case, how come my session was restored with open browsers? Usually after a reboot nothing is open.

Now I have disabled updates for a few weeks. We'll see if the issue happens again.

LOL. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Yesterday was patch Tuesday. The browser can automatically re-launch with tabs you had open previously restored. It's a feature . Even things like notepad can do that now.

Let me see if I can grab some details for you. Back in a few minutes...

Okay, here are few settings. "Automatically save my restartable apps and restart them when I sign back in" is one of them. Not all apps are restartable, but browsers like Edge are one of them.

Also, the setting "Use my sign-in info to automatically finish setting up after an update" is an interesting one. The idea is that after rebooting from installing updates, this setting will cause Windows to sign you in with a special token, then instantly lock the screen. So, it would behave exactly the same you as you rebooting, signing in, then locking the screen. As a result, you are actually logged in at that point. This is why you would see the lock screen displayed at this point in time.



Also, as I noted earlier, Notepad is another example of a restartable app. In addition, look for this option in Notepad settings:



Just be aware that even without this setting, if memory serves correctly, I believe that since it is a restartable app, it can still maintain what you have across a reboot.

This can actually be extremely helpful. I often run with a dozen or more browser tabs open. I love that I can reboot my system and have all of them open even after a reboot. Also, if I have some notes jotted down in Notepad, I won't lose those.

Thank you! Wow. Windows has become so complex, there are settings everywhere!

This morning I found my PC in a normal state, just like I left it. So I guess all this was due to Windows Update.
Sadly Microsoft made updates mandatory ("it's for the greater good"... lol). So for users to swallow the pill without complaining too much, they also created such sign-in options, so that users could at least find a part of their open apps when they came back.

Anyway, mystery solved I guess.