Sleep Timer for Your Computer:
The Ultimate Guide

One of the common complaints about computers is that their battery life isn't always the best. As a result, people may find themselves frequently needing to charge their devices. When this happens at an inconvenient time, it can throw a wrench in your plans. There are several ways to help extend your computer's battery life, but a simple one is using a sleep timer.

What is a sleep timer?

A sleep timer is a function that dictates how long your computer will sit idle before going into power-saving mode. Your computer is considered to be idle if there is no movement occurring on the screen.

So, for example, you could instruct your computer to have a five-minute sleep timer, which means after five means of idle time, it will automatically go into power-saving mode. This can help prolong your battery life.

How to use sleep timers for your computer

Depending on whether you are using a Mac or Windows PC, the process for setting a sleep timer looks a little different. Here are directions on how to do it for both Mac and Windows.

Mac

  1. Click on the Apple icon on the top left of the toolbar.
  2. Go to System Preferences-then Energy saver-then Power adapter.
  3. On a Mac laptop, two tabs will pop up: Battery and Power adapter. Each has its own settings. An iMac will only have one option since your device is always plugged in.
  4. Using the Computer sleep slider, set how quickly you want your device to go into sleep mode after idling.
  5. Set the sleep mode for your monitor using the Display sleep slider. This will turn your display off after a certain period of inactivity.

Windows

  1. Press Windows key + Q, which will open the search menu.
  2. In the search menu, type "Sleep."
  3. Several options will appear. Click on "Power and sleep settings."
  4. Once that window opens, scroll down to "Sleep" This will give you several drop-down menus.
  5. Click on the drop-down menus to open them and then choose how long you want your device to sit idle before going to sleep.
  6. Once you have selected your sleep timer, close the window, and your settings will be saved.

Turn on sleep timer using Parallels Toolbox

Parallels Toolbox is an all-in-one program that has all the tools you could possibly need. One of these tools is a sleep timer. Follow these directions to use the sleep timer.

  1. Open the Parallels Toolbox program on your device.
  2. Look through all the available tools and click on Sleep Timer.
  3. When the Sleep Timer opens, you will see two drop-down boxes. One lets you choose between Sleep, Shut down, or Force shut down. Select Sleep.
  4. The second drop-down gives you increments of time. Select how much time you want to pass before you want your computer to enter sleep mode.
  5. Click Start. When the timer runs out, your computer will shut down.
  6. At any time during the countdown, you can click cancel to stop it from shutting down.

Conclusion

If you want to have a longer battery life on your device, employing the sleep timer is a great way to do so. You set your computer to a specific duration of time, and after that amount of time has passed, your device will automatically shut off.

Parallels Toolbox is an incredible product that has all the computer tools you could possibly need all gathered together in one place. No longer do you need to dig through your computer applications to find what you need. Instead, simply open up Parallels Toolbox and select the tool you need.