I had a problem recently with Windows 7 refusing to go to sleep. I would click “Sleep” and the screen would go off but all the fans were still going and on moving the mouse around I would be presented with the login screen – not exactly “Sleep” in my books. This baffled me, and no matter how many times I told the machine to go to sleep it would behave the same way.

In the end I’d just give up and shut the machine down, but last night I was feeling in the mood to do a bit of investigation so I looked around and found a few posts which answered the issue.

First up was “Windows 7 – Why your computer won’t go to sleep” where I discovered a new command for investigating exactly this issue – I could run “powercfg /requests” to see what was causing the computer to fail to go to sleep.

You need to run this as an administrator, so go to start, type “cmd” and right-click the Cmd icon and select “Run as Administrator” as shown in the screen capture to the right.

This launches your command line interface where you should type “powercfg /requests”. Note if you don’t run this as administrator you will get an error message on running the command.

Below you can see the offending result:

AWAYMODE:
[PROCESS] \Device\HarddiskVolume2\Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmpnetwk.exe
Media Sharing has been enabled through Windows Media Player.

Instantly this revealed that there was something active with Windows Media Player.

A bit of research dug up the fact that Windows Media Player 12 comes with an option for Media Sharing – not something I’ve ever used or ever see myself using. This post on superuser gave me an idea of what was going on.

I investigated my Homegroup settings and found that Homegroups weren’t enabled, but I did remember having switched Homegroups on when I first installed Windows 7 to test them out as a possible alternative to old-style networking. So it looked as though Windows 7 had enabled this service and it was running by default whether I wanted it or not.

Simple solution: disable the service entirely and prevent it from running.

To do this, go to start and type “services.msc” and hit enter. This launches your services configuration editor. Scroll down to “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service” and right-click and open “Properties”. In here you can stop the service and change the “Startup Type” to “Disabled”. Click apply and you’re all done.

If you want you can now run “powercfg /requests” again and you’ll no longer see wmpnetwk.exe causing any block on your computer going into sleep mode.

Happy sleeping!