Have you connected your Windows 10/11 laptop to an external monitor? Does not your Dell external monitor wake up from sleep after you wake up the laptop? In this guide, we will tell you how to fix this problem quickly.

If you have connected your Windows 11/10 laptop to a Dell external monitor and the monitor refuses to wake up from sleep when you wake up the laptop, you might think that the issue is with Windows 10/11 or its drivers. Even I had thought the same. But it might have nothing to do with Windows operating system.

My laptop running Windows 11 would go to sleep after five minutes of inactivity. The laptop would wake up from sleep whenever I touched the trackpad or pressed a key. However, the external Dell monitor (Dell P2415Q, if it helps), which I connected to my laptop, always refused to wake up from sleep.

I had to manually power off and on the screen to wake it from sleep. My old HP external monitor did not have this issue when connected to the same laptop.

Reset Dell monitor’s energy settings

Although this solution applies to Dell monitors, you can try this solution on monitors from other brands as well.

Step 1: Use the physical buttons of the Dell monitor to open the menu.

Step 2: Switch to the Energy tab. Select the Reset Energy Settings option and then press the OK button on your monitor to reset the energy settings. The screen might go blank for a second during the reset process.

That’s it! From on, the Dell monitor should wake up from sleep without any issues.

Disable Dell monitor’s deep sleep mode

While researching online, again on the Dell support forum, it came to our knowledge that some Dell monitors come with a deep sleep mode which prevents the monitor from waking up from sleep. All you need to do is turn off the deep sleep mode.

According to the Dell support page, the deep sleep feature makes sure that the monitor does not use more than 0.5 W while in sleep mode. If you turn it off, it might use more than 0.5 W. Since my Dell monitor does not have this option, I have taken the picture from the Dell support page.

The deep sleep mode can be found in the Others tab on your Dell monitor.