Stay-Awake Utility
May 2026
KeepAlive
A one-click pinned Windows app that keeps your laptop awake while its window is open and reverts power settings the moment you close it. No tray icon, no settings, no admin rights, just a single self-contained .NET 9 executable.
A button that does one thing
Windows is really eager to put your laptop to sleep. Most of the time, great. But sometimes it's the worst, like when you're reading something long, waiting on a download, or presenting and the screen dims on you mid-sentence and you're left wiggling the mouse to wake it back up.
There are great tools that fix this. They also come with tray icons, timers, presets, settings menus. I didn't want any of that. I wanted one button: open the window, laptop stays awake. Close it, back to normal. That's the whole thing.
How small is it, really
It's one little window with a green dot, the words "Keeping this laptop awake," and a counter showing how long it's been running. No tray icon, so when the window's closed, the app is just gone. No settings, so there's nothing to get wrong. No admin rights. You pin it to your taskbar once and click it whenever.
Underneath, it's the tiniest possible wrapper around one Windows call that says "don't sleep until I tell you to." Honestly, every stay-awake app you've ever used is just a wrapper around that same call. KeepAlive just refuses to be anything more than that.
The part I actually fussed over
The whole thing rests on one promise: when you close the window, the keep-awake flag turns back off. Every single time. So I went through every way the app can possibly close, the X, Esc, Alt+F4, logging off, a crash, getting force-killed in Task Manager, and made sure the flag clears in all of them. A stay-awake app that forgets to stop is just a battery-draining prank you played on yourself.
It's around two hundred lines of code, and honestly most of that effort went into the exits, not the window.
What it can't do
Quick bit of honesty: on most newer laptops, closing the lid still puts it to sleep no matter what KeepAlive wants, because that's a hardware thing the app isn't allowed to override. Same with the physical power button. To stop those you have to go change Windows' power settings yourself. KeepAlive keeps the screen and system awake, and that's it. It doesn't pick fights it can't win.