How to Prevent Your Monitor from Going to Sleep While Gaming

Gaming is a thrilling experience, but technical issues like a sleeping monitor can quickly dampen the excitement. This common problem can interrupt even the most immersive gaming sessions, leaving players searching for solutions.

In this article, we’ll explore practical tips to keep your monitor awake and responsive, ensuring an enjoyable gaming experience.

Let’s dive into these helpful strategies and keep the gaming momentum going strong.

Disabling Screen Saver

Screen saver typically kicks in when your computer is idle, aiming to protect against screen burn-in. This function, while useful in some scenarios, can interrupt your gaming by causing the monitor to go into sleep mode.

To turn off the screen saver, right-click on the desktop and select ‘Personalize’.

Then, head to the ‘Lock screen’ tab and find ‘Screen saver settings‘ at the bottom of this section.

In the screen saver settings window, change the screen saver option to ‘None’.

This adjustment will prevent the screen saver from activating while you’re gaming, providing an uninterrupted experience.

Adjusting Power Settings

Similar to disabling the screen saver feature, tweaking your power settings is another way to prevent your monitor from going to sleep during gaming.

Power settings determine how your computer manages energy consumption and inactivity. They can cause the monitor to sleep in some cases, especially during long gaming sessions.

To optimize these settings:

Go to the Control Panel and select ‘Hardware and Sound’, then ‘Power Options’.

Once you’re there, you’ll see different plans like ‘Balanced’, ‘Power Saver’, and ‘High Performance’. Click on ‘Change plan settings’ next to your chosen plan. In my case, it’s the Balanced mode that I’m currently using.

From there, change the ‘Turn off the display’ and ‘Put the computer to sleep’ settings to ‘Never’.

Laptop Lid Position

Lastly, for laptop users, if your external monitor goes to sleep during gaming, the issue might be related to your laptop lid.

When using an external monitor, if your laptop lid is closed, the system could interpret this as a signal to enter sleep mode, thereby disrupting your game. To prevent this, adjusting the settings that control your laptop’s behavior when the lid is closed is important.

Here’s how to make this adjustment:

First, just like we did in the previous section, open the Control Panel and select ‘Hardware and Sound’. Once you’re there, click on ‘Power Options’, then find and select ‘Choose what closing the lid does’ from the sidebar.

In the ‘When I close the lid’ section, set both the ‘On battery’ and ‘Plugged in’ options to ‘Do nothing’.

This change ensures that closing your laptop lid won’t affect your gaming session, allowing you to enjoy uninterrupted gameplay on your external monitor.

Conclusion

We hope these tips have helped you resolve the issue of your monitor going to sleep during gaming. We also have another article about monitors that go black randomly, in case yours does that too.

With that said, we’re eager to hear about your experience – feel free to drop a comment sharing which method worked best for you.