Choice PowerToys Awake review - it's quite useful (Awake, not the review) - feedback

Electronics & Technology
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How to customise Windows with PowerToys | CHOICE

Awake

Awake lets you override the sleep settings for your display. But given you can also do most of the same things from within the Windows settings menu, it’s not one of the more useful PowerToys tools.

This particular subsection of the review is unfair.

To change the settings to stay awake through the default computer settings requires the user to navigate through several different pages. The convenience factor if it just allowed you to switch on and off again awake mode would be worth it alone.

But there’s more, it has the option of changing the setting back to normal after an interval or a set expiry date - this is useful for enhanced security if you forget to change the settings to lock the computer.

I’ve been searching far and wide to install the similar Caffeine app for Android which I have on all my Android devices.

So yes it’s a simple app but I’d say useful.

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I agree! For those of us who from time to time have reason to stop our Windows PCs from going to sleep or hibernating automatically, Power Toys Awake is far simpler and quicker than diving into Settings, wading through several levels, changing the sleep configuration, and then remembering to change the settings back later.

Enable Awake and it’ll stay in the systray, using very few resources, and you can quickly grab it and turn it on or off, set a timer, etc.

The article’s wrong about how to get PowerToys, too. Many non-mainstream Windows apps are available from the Windows Store and/or can be installed with the winget CLI command.

Use winget search to see if an app you’re interested in is available. For example,

winget search powertoys
Name                         Id                            Version Match          Source
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Microsoft PowerToys          XP89DCGQ3K6VLD                Unknown                msstore
PowerToys                    Microsoft.PowerToys           0.89.0                 winget
EverythingPowerToys          lin-ycv.EverythingPowerToys   0.88.0  Tag: powertoys winget
PowerToys-Run-Currency-Conv… advaith.CurrencyConverterPow… 1.5.2   Tag: PowerToys winget

winget install microsoft.powertoys

The search shows the source of each app. Source ‘winget’ means it’ll get it from GitHub (winget handles the downloading and installing for you); ‘msstore’ means it’ll come from the Windows Store.

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… and this reason could be, for example, keeping the laptop awake while you’re using a recipe.

In my case it’s because I want to keep an SSH session to one of my linux servers alive so an auto-disconnection doesn’t kill a process I’m running.

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Thanks for the reply and agreement!

However the installation instructions do work.

There’s a much easier and less scary way to install PowerToys through MS Store. The link is either https://aka.ms/getPowertoys or https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/xp89dcgq3k6vld?hl=en-GB&gl=AU for the full version for those not familiar with the aka.ms Microsoft URL Shortener. I think you may have said that but it wasn’t clear to me.

EDIT: I guess I’m pulling at small strings and with a fast read may miss it but what I meant was that it wasn’t clear to me you were referring to PowerToys when you said Many non-mainstream Windows apps. It might be pedantic but if you had said:

The article’s wrong about how to get PowerToys, too. Many non-mainstream Windows apps (such as PowerToys) are available from the Windows Store and/or can be installed with the winget CLI command.

it would have been crystal clear

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I said it’s available via the Windows Store app. The Store is a standard app that comes with Windows, so I didn’t think detailed instructions would be needed.

Edit: I admit, mentioning that winget can also source apps from ‘msstore’ could have been confusing. And yes, the Choice article instructions would work. It had said that downloading directly from GitHub is the only way to get PowerToys, and that’s the bit that isn’t correct. :slightly_smiling_face:

Just open the Store app and search for ‘powertoys’. “Microsoft PowerToys” should be top of the list of results.

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