My main Windows 10 desktop workstation is a dual monitor setup. It’s set to fall into sleep mode automatically when I am not using it for certain period of time. It works quite well most of the time but sometimes after waking up, all previous application’s arrangement would lose their original position prior the sleep to wake cycle. All the applications would re-position themselves to the primary monitor instead of stay at their previous last known positions.
If you too notice this, know that this is not the expected behavior. Windows 10 should remember and resume exactly where you left off after sleep and awake cycle.
There are a couple of reasons why your machine might show such symptoms. The primary reason is that your graphics driver is outdated. That’s what likely would happen if you have upgraded to a newer Windows version without checking if all the drivers are up-to-date. Here are some resources that you can use to check if your graphic card has a new driver for your Windows 10.
If upgrading the driver does not fix your problem, Windows is doing one of the following things when waking up. One of your monitors takes longer to startup and “connect” to Windows, as a result when waking up, Windows only detected one monitor and all your application would then auto re-arrange to that monitor. When the second monitor made its way online there will be no application windows left to be positioned on it.
Another possibility is that there is a race condition in which the order of the monitor from going sleep to waking up differs from time to time. Thus, the same would happen just like above, applications scatter around.
The fix for those causes could be the monitor or cable themselves. If there are adapters involved see if using a native cable input without adaptor would yield a different result. If possible update both monitor(s) to be the same model. Give the above a try and hopefully, some of the tips can solve your issue from losing app position from waking up from sleep mode.