Summary
I rarely ever shut off my PC, and that’s a bad habit I’ve been wanting to break for a while now. However, I need my computer on all the time, and restarting would mean having to start all the programs and workflows from scratch, which would hurt my productivity. Although I do take intermittent breaks, I noticed a slight friction when engaging with my peripherals again. Upon digging a bit, I found that this isn’t a performance issue but rather a wake-up delay used by Windows as a power-saving feature. For desktop PCs, that rarely adds up to anything and works counterintuitively for performance. Fortunately, you can disable the USB selective suspend setting to make your peripherals more responsive. What USB selective suspend actually does A battery-saving trick with no place on a desktop Windows tends to decide what’s best for users, and most of the time, that works to their detriment. There’s a cohort of Windows settings that can disrupt your workflow. One notable example is the sluggishness you might experience in the menus, a slight delay intended for older Windows that can be fixed with a single registry tweak. The case I’m referring to right now is USB selective suspend, a power-saving feature intended for Windows laptops that is practically useless on desktop PCs and only creates pointless friction. What USB selective suspend does is suspend power to your USB peripherals like your mouse, keyboard, and headphones after a period of inactivity. When you try to use these peripherals again, you might encounter a slight hiccup as they wake back up, and if you’re constantly away from your PC like I am, that occasional delay can become annoying. Hubs, docks, and high-bandwidth devices take the worst hit This power-saving feature can disrupt workflow if your desktop has an external SSD or a webcam USB selective suspend gets worse with USB hubs or docks that extend your connectivity, since they don’t negotiate power states well. After a period of inactivity, all your devices can disconnect, and in some cases Windows may even fail to wake them, which is why you’d need to plug them back in. External SSDs and webcams are more affected by USB selective suspend. External displays connected via USB, e.g. through DisplayLink, may start to flicker or disappear entirely. Other than that, if you’re using Wi-Fi or a Bluetooth dongle connected via a USB port, those devices can also get disabled after brief inactivity, and your network might also experience a slight delay in reconnecting. With Bluetooth devices, some can disconnect when the dongle loses power. How to turn off USB selective suspend You can have control over your device’s power management Disabling USB selective suspend is relatively straightforward, and there are multiple ways to do it. First, you can disable the feature completely through Power Options, and to do that, follow these steps:
- Open Control Panel.
- Go to Hardware and Sound.
- Enter Power Options.
- Select your current Power Plan and change its settings.
- Change Advanced power settings.
- Expand USB Settings.
- Select USB selective suspend.
- Change to Disable. If you still want to disable USB selective suspend for specific devices, that’s also possible. To do so:
- Search for Device Manager in Windows Search.
- Expand the USB section.
- Open the specific USB hub and go to its Properties.
- Go to Power Management.
- Uncheck the option “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power.” The latter method, disabling power-off for selective devices, would work for laptops where you still want to save power but don’t want Windows to turn off a USB hub after inactivity if you’re using a dock on that hub. A separate setting, same annoying effect Aside from external adapters, your Windows PC has a similar power-saving behavior for internal devices. Specifically, desktops with internal Wi-Fi cards can also go to sleep after a brief period of inactivity, disrupting your workflow and connectivity. Windows does this to save power. Fortunately, you can change this setting by going to Power Options → Advanced Power Settings → PCI Express → Link State Power Management and disabling it. My cursor stutters were annoying but tolerable — the disappearing drives weren’t Every time I picked up my mouse after coming back to my setup, the first few frames of the cursor moving were annoying, and there was a visible stutter as the device woke up. However, the worst experience was with external drives: I had to plug my drive back in for Windows to recognize it again. Fortunately, disabling USB selective suspend eliminated these issues, and I no longer have to reconnect every device after returning to my PC from a brief break.