Before you start
Objectives: Learn where and how can you configure Power Options in Vista in order to conserve your battery.
Prerequisites: you should read about Power Management in Windows in general.
Key terms: power, options, plan, configure, vista, balanced, computer, advanced
Power Options
To configure Power Options in Vista we will go to the Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options.
Power Plans
Here we can select a power plan. As you can see there are three predefined plans: Balanced, Power saver, and High performance. We can customize each plan as we like. Let’s look at the balanced plan.
Balanced Power Plan
In our case we see options in case our computer runs on battery and in case our computer is plugged in. If you don’t have a battery, you’ll only see option for the plugged in state. If we click on the “Change advanced power settings” option we will see many other options that we can configure.
Advanced Options
Here we can change the plan which we want to customize and then change particular setting. We can configure how logn the computer will wait after a period of inaction before turning off the hard disk, we can modify the how our wireless adapter, USB devices, PCI devices, display devices, CPU, and other use power.
On the left hand side of the Power Options window we have a “Choose what the power button does” option.
If you are not on a laptop, you will probably only see the power button option.
We can also create a custom power plan, but I don’t think that you will be using that option very often :).