Vista's Advanced Power Management Functionality
Submitted by Vlad on Mon, 11/12/2007 - 04:42.
Windows Vista has incorporated much finer grained control over Windows' power management features. Not only can you control when your monitor turns off or your hard disks spin down, new options let you choose when wireless devices go into power saving mode, USB devices suspend, and more.
Like with Windows XP, the Power Options can be access from the Control Panel. I suggest you switch to "Classic View" or else you'll need to dig around for it.
Start -> Control Panel -> "Classic View"
The new Power Options dialog is much more work-flow oriented. Shortcuts in the left bar are useful for common tasks, and the three pre-configured power plans present good starting places, but some customization will probably need to be done.
The New Power Options
When customizing a plan, the first two options you're presented with will be the ones sought after by most users: controlling the display and sleep mode. Desktop users will almost undoubtedly want to set the sleep option to Never - when I leave my computer on it's on for a reason.
The Basics
By clicking on the Changed advanced power settings link, an additional dialog box will open allowing you to fine tune all power saving options. Most people reading this will probably immediately spot the Hard disk option - as both of my machines have more than 2 hard disks in them, waiting for them to spin up is annoying. I immediately disabled this option.
Customizing Advanced Power Options
The usefulness of the rest of the options is somewhat open to debate. Most will be useful to laptop users, such as Power buttons and lid, although desktop users wishing to change the power button from the sleep default in the start menu will be glad to find you can change it to something more useful (like Shut Down).
All in all, the new options are a welcome change and remove a lot of the ambiguity and lack of customization that existed with Windows XP. Most desktop users will immediately wish to change the Start menu power button, disable sleep mode, and disable hard disk spin-down, all easily and quickly accomplished from within Power Options.
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