Is there an app that will disallow my Win10 desktop from "sleeping" ?

mngerhold said:

I am fairly certain I do know what causes the lag: Microsoft Defender (or its similarly-named predecessors). This has bugged me since XP days (MSE) - it appears that MD insists on checking each shortcut in a particular sub-folder before displaying the folder - so if the SCs involve 'tricky' programs, then the check can take many seconds. Why? because it seems MD actually does a scan on the .exe called by each SC. Once it has checked a particular folder, it will be snappy until one has re-booted or logged off - then it goes through its silly rigmarole all over again.
I never found a way with MSE to stop this happening, nor with MD. Attempting to exclude the folders with the SCs never worked - and its a pain to test, as one has to log out and in again to see if one has achieved anything. I could probably have excluded, one by one, the folders containing the executables, but that would be a pain also. So I have recently taken to completely disabling MD.
Its a shame, because I have found a taskbar toolbar to be the perfect substitute for the crippled 'start menu' that W10 offers. I hope this helps someone.

Martin,

That's interesting. My lag has been so infrequent that I had no idea it could be WD scanning. I'll bear this in mind, await the next occurence and get back to you.
- WD can be a pain.

- It has recently taken to repeatedly quarantining a particular .lnk file [not the batch file it refers to but the .lnk itself] and a vbs despite my Allowing them.
- I've now added the vbs to WD Exclusions and all is well
- I've having to wait on the .lnk detection to happen again so I can check more carefully.

mngerhold said:

An impressive set of folders, Denis! Mine is puny.

My Taskbar Toolbars have been my Windows user interface for a decade.
And it's so easy to add/delete entries that they evolve every week.


Denis

Reading back to OP's first post, this line:

I've had issues where I've come in next morning and the desktop has put the network to sleep and put the USB drives to sleep to conserve power and that has stopped the copy.


Addressing those two, network and USB, the following Power Management Settings in Device Manager Properties of the network and USB controllers will allow the system to "sleep" the devices when there is a lull in activity. 20 minutes lull comes to mind, but that may be different. In any case, if the file transfer job he has going does pause for a sufficient length of time, and these are enabled, the system will do as it says..... turn them off. It then becomes a local issue of waking.