Dad had recently purchased an Intel NUCM15 laptop to give him some flexibility when playing live with The Paisley Ties. It’s a nice laptop. But for some reason the device kept putting itself to sleep at random intervals. This was an odd one; it happened regardless of whether the power management settings were set to “Never turn off” or to hibernate after a specific time. Screensaver settings, screen settings etc were all played with but the behaviour continued. It was like the battery saver mode was set to extreme and it wasn’t interested in behaving otherwise. It seemed like either a battery fault or some lower-level setting that refused to recognise the settings in Windows. An update to the BIOS didn’t help. The weird thing was it didn’t occur at exactly the same time, every time. After quite a bit of head scratching and Googling it turned out that it was actually a feature. There’s a presence-detection feature based on motion detected by the camera that, if it doesn’t see anyone using the laptop, will lock the device. This is presumably for security and power-saving and it actually makes sense as an option. The only problem was that in this case the laptop is being used while playing or recording music which meant that there wasn’t always someone sitting in front of the screen. It turns out this feature is controlled via the Intel NUC Software Studio, which wasn’t installed on the device. Once the presence-detection option was switched off there, the problem was solved. Who knew?