️Espresso

A power plan that puts your PC in standby mode after a period of inactivity can reduce your electricity bill and greatly increase a laptop’s battery life. When you have important work to do, however, you may wish to keep your computer awake without disabling the power plan altogether.

️Espresso is a tiny, open-source application that enables you to block sleep mode for a certain amount of time. It is very unobtrusive and easily accessible from a system tray icon.

Once launched, the application will be minimized to the system tray area. If you right-click the icon, you can enable the standby blocker and specify for how long sleep mode should be disabled.

There are a few durations to choose from, ranging from 5 minutes to 12 hours. You can also just keep your computer awake indefinitely and disable the function manually when you have finished working.

It would be great if it were possible to double-click the tray icon to quickly disable sleep mode indefinitely and then enable it again. Of course, users would still be able to select a specific duration from the menu.

Also, users may wish to remove some of the duration options from the menu or simply have the option to enter a custom value.

From the application’s settings, you can specify whether it should be activated upon launch and which duration should be used. The utility only runs in the system tray, and you can easily tell when it is active by glancing at the icon.

All in all, ️Espresso is a neat little program for users who need a simple way to prevent their PCs from going to sleep temporarily. It can still be improved in certain respects, but it will get the job done.