Stop Windows From Going to Sleep
Your POS station should never sleep. It takes about two minutes to fix, and it prevents a whole category of “it was working yesterday” problems.
Why this matters
Windows ships with sleep turned on, because it is set up for a home computer that sits idle most of the day. A register is not a home computer. When it sleeps, four things go wrong at once:
- The Sync Tool stops syncing. Sales, inventory, and customer data stop moving between the station and TORO. Everything catches up once the machine wakes, but until then your reports and online store are looking at stale numbers.
- The card terminal goes unresponsive. Windows cuts power to the USB ports when it sleeps. The terminal loses its connection and often will not come back until it is unplugged and plugged in again — usually with a customer standing at the counter.
- Other stations cannot reach the main one. A sleeping main station takes the shared database down with it. Second and third registers throw connection errors even though nothing is actually broken.
- We cannot get in to help you. Remote support needs the machine awake. If a station is asleep overnight, we cannot push an update or look at a problem before you open.
Turning off the monitor is not the same as sleeping
You can absolutely shut the screen off at night to save the display — that costs you nothing. What you want to avoid is the computer itself going to sleep. The steps below leave the machine awake and let you handle the screen however you like.
How to turn off sleep
Do this on every TORO station. Steps 1–3 cover most machines; steps 4 and 5 are what stop the intermittent terminal and network dropouts.
- 1
Open Power settings.
Press the Windows key, type Power & sleep, and press Enter. You can also get there through Start → Settings → System → Power. On a laptop it is called Power & batteryinstead — same place.
- 2
Open “Screen and sleep”.
Click Screen and sleep to expand it. You will see two or four dropdowns depending on the machine. A NUC or any plugged-in station shows two; a laptop shows an extra pair for battery.
- 3
Set every dropdown to Never.
Change Turn off my screen after and Make my device sleep after to Never. If you see the battery versions of those same settings, set them to Nevertoo. The change saves itself — there is no OK button.
- 4
Stop Windows from powering down the USB ports.
This is the one most people miss, and it is what quietly drops your card terminal and scanner. Press the Windows key, type Edit power plan, press Enter, then click Change advanced power settings. In the list, expand USB settings → USB selective suspend setting and set it to Disabled. While you are in there, set Hard disk → Turn off hard disk after to 0 (that shows as Never). Click OK.
- 5
Stop Windows from powering down the network card.
Press the Windows key, type Device Manager, press Enter. Expand Network adapters, right-click your adapter, choose Properties, open the Power Management tab, and uncheck“Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power.” Click OK. Do this for the Ethernet adapter, and the Wi-Fi one if the station is on Wi-Fi.
Good to know
- Leaving it on is fine. A NUC draws a few watts sitting idle. It is built to run around the clock, and every station we support does.
- A Windows update can reset these. If a station starts dropping its terminal again months later, come back and check these settings before assuming hardware failed.
- Screen saver and lock screen are separate.A screen saver is harmless. A lock screen is fine too — the machine keeps running behind it. Only sleep and hibernate cause the problems above.
- Also worth doing: set the NUC to power itself back on after an outage. That is a BIOS setting, covered on the Sync Tool auto-start page.
Want us to do it for you?
Message us on WhatsApp and we will remote in and set every station up correctly — sleep, USB, and network, all at once.