I'm hoping that someone here can offer a solution to a relatively minor but annoying technical problem I'm having.

Up until a couple of weeks ago I had my PC power and sleep settings set to turn the screen off after two minutes and put the computer into sleep mode after 15 minutes. The PC is a couple of years old and this has worked flawlessly up until recently.

In the past few weeks the monitor will still turn off after the set time but the computer will not enter into sleep mode. I have gone into the settings and the advanced settings and made changes to the time and even changes to the profile is applying but none of these seem to work. The PC will not enter into sleep mode.

To make matters more confusing, there was a period of about four days last week when the sleep function worked again.

A quick search on Google shows that there may be some background app running that is preventing the PC from going into sleep mode. I've checked Task Manager and there doesn't appear to be anything running. Further, prior to this problem cropping up I could have web pages or MS Office documents open and the computer would still go into sleep mode.

I don't think that I have knowingly installed any software recently that would cause this problem. My thought is that it may be related to an automatic update but I can't say for certain whether or not this problem started after an update was installed.

Can anyone offer any solutions?

Thanks