Hello and welcome back to your free Windows 7 training course for the 70-680 exam. In
this video I will look at power configuration in Windows 7. This is particular important
on laptops as having the right power settings on a laptop can greatly increase the time
a laptop can run off battery power.
Before I get started on power configuration settings in Windows 7, I first want to define
a few power modes used in Windows 7. The first is sleep mode. When the computer is put into
sleep mode, non-essential devices are shut down. These include the hard disk and monitor.
Also CPU power consumption is reduced.
While is sleep mode, power is still used to power the RAM. The advantage of this is that
the computer will wake from sleep mode very quickly. When the computer awakes from sleep
it will return to the same state it was before it when to sleep. All that needs to happen
is devices that were shut down need to start operating again. The slowest of these will
be the hard disk which needs time to spin up again.
The disadvantage of sleep mode is the computer still needs a small amount of power to operate.
This is still a lot less than normal but if you are running off batteries this will evenly
flatten the battery and all the data in the RAM will be lost.
To get around this problem, there is also anther mode called hibernation mode. When
the computer is put into hibernation mode the contents of RAM are saved to the hard
disk. Once the RAM is saved the computer is shut down so no power is being used.
When the computer is woken from hibernation mode, the RAM is read back in from the hard
disk and the computer will start up again from where it left off.
The advantage of hibernation mode is that the computer can stay in hibernation mode
for an indefinite amount of time. The disadvantage with hibernation mode is that since the computer
needs to read the RAM from the hard disk, to wake from hibernation mode is a lot slower
than to wake from sleep mode. Also since the RAM needs to be saved to the hard disk to
switch the laptop into hibernation mode takes longer then to go into sleep mode.
The last mode that Windows 7 supports is hybrid sleep. This combines both hibernation and
sleep together. When the laptop enters hybrid sleep mode, the contents of RAM are saved
to the hard disk. Once this is complete the computer goes into sleep mode. If the computer
is woken up from sleep mode the computer is quick to start up. This is because the contents
of RAM are still available and don’t have to be read from the hard disk. While in sleep
mode if the power runs out the contents of RAM will be lost. If the computer is then
started up after power is lost, the contents of RAM will be read from the hard disk.
Hybrid sleep gives you the advantages of both sleep and hibernation mode. Besides being
able to put your computer to sleep, hibernation or hybrid sleep mode, there are also other
power options that can be applied to your computer to save power. For example, the hard
disk can be spun down to save power, the screen can be dimmed or switch off to save power.
To make configuration of these settings easier, Microsoft has pre-configured these settings
into 3 different power plans. The default plan is balance, this as the name suggests
a balance between performance and power saving.
The next power plan is high performance. When in this mode performance is maximized. This
means devices like the hard disk are not spun down. This maximize the speed of your computer
and it’s responsiveness, however it also does mean that power consumption is higher.
On a laptop this means that this will reduce the amount of time that the laptop can run
off batteries. If you are using a desktop the high performance plan will make sure that
you always have the best performance, but this will also give you a higher power bill
in the process.
The last of the 3 default power plans is power saver. This power plan uses the least amount
of power but also offers the worse performance. If you want to get the most out of the battery
on your laptop you should select this plan or if you want to try and reduce your power
bills. I will now change to my Windows 7 computer to demonstrate how to configure power options
in Windows 7.
To access the power options, open the control panel and then go to system and security and
select power options. In the power options you can see the balanced plan and the power
saver plan.
At the bottom is the option show additional plans. When I select this the high performance
plan will appear. These plans are pre-configured by Microsoft, but you can always make changes
by selecting change plan settings.
Notice that on this screen all the options are greyed out. In a lot of places in the
power control panel you will need to select an option like change settings that are currently
unavailable. Since this is a laptop, there will be two groups of settings, one for running
when using the battery and the other when plugged into the power.
Even though this is a pre-configured power plan I can change any setting that I want,
for example I could change the display to never dim. If I were to go back and go into
the settings for high performance, notice that the options for putting the computer
to sleep is never. It is not recommend to make to many changes to the default power
plans as this can cause a lot of confusion. Imagine if you changed the power saver options
to the same options as high performance.
If you want to make a lot of changes, I would recommend from the power options screen selecting
the option create a power plan. From here, you can select one of the default power plans
to use as a template and then later change the settings however you want. In this case
I will select high performance and call my new plan ultra-high performance.
On the next screen I can change the options copied from the template. What I will do is
select never for all the options when plugged into power. Once the new power plan is created,
notice the new plan is listed with the other and is the active plan.
If I now go into the change plan settings I can change the settings as before, but this
time I will select the option down the bottom change advanced power settings. Under sleep,
notice I have the same options as before that effect when the computer goes to sleep, but
also notice that the additional option allow hybrid sleep. This is the only place that
you can configure hybrid sleep. As before, notice that I need to select the option change
settings that are currently unavailable and this will allow me to switch hybrid sleep
to on.
When hybrid sleep is configured, the laptop when going to sleep will also save a copy
of the RAM to the hard disk. If the battery runs out or the power is disconnect, when
the computer starts up again it will read a copy of the RAM from the hard disk and carry
on from where it left off.
Notice also there are additional options for wireless adapter settings and processor power
management. If you really want some control over how your computer uses power, you should
spend some time going through the advanced settings.
If I now go back to the power options control panel, I can also select choose what the power
button do. This will allow me to configure what the buttons on the laptop do. Once again
having to select the option change settings that are currently unavailable before I can
change anything.
Here you can change the power button to make the laptop sleep, hibernate or shut down when
the button is pushed. If you are into practical jokes, you could configure all the buttons
to do nothing and real confuse the person using the laptop.
Going back to the power options again, the last thing that I want to look at is the option
down the bottom for window mobility center. This option brings up a whole heap of useful
laptop setting in the one place.
A lot of these are related to presentation. For example, if you were giving a presentation
and want to adjust the display brightness for working in a dark room. You can also mute
the speaks to stop alarms coming up in your presentation.
You can change power options and even turn off the wireless networking. If you are connecting
to an external projector or monitor you can disconnect or connect the display here. The
last option enables presentation settings. Not covered here, but what you can do is configure
a whole heap of presentation settings and simply switch them on or off.
3rd party vendors can also add their own options in here. Notice down the bottom there is an
option to enable hard disk protection supplied by Hewlett Packard. Depending on the model
of your laptop and the features it has, more or less options may be available in here.
You can also configure the power options from the command line. To do this, first open a
command prompt from the start menu making sure you open it with administrator privileges.
The entire power configuration from the command line works with the PowerCFG utility.
The first switch I will use with this utility is minus list. This will show all the power
plans on this computer with their global unique identifiers or guid’s. The guid identifies
the plan and used with a lot of other parameters in the PowerCFG utility.
If you want to know what devices will wake your computer up while it is a sleep you can
use the parameter minus device query wake from any. This will show all the devices that
can wake the computer up while sleeping.
If you want a report on the power configuration on your laptop you can use the minus energy
parameter. This does takes a minute to run but I will pause the video and restart it
after it has completed so we don’t have to wait.
Notice that the report is saved as a html file. I can now open this file in internet
explorer. In the middle of the report there is a section that will tell you any errors
that are found. In this case there is one service installed on this laptop that may
prevent the laptop from going to sleep. The next error is in regards to a device on this
system that has been disabled due to an incompatibility with the hardware. This may not be a problem,
but if you want something like this fixed, first try updating all your device drivers
and install all the latest Windows updates.
Following this there are some warning and programming information at the bottom. Once
you have a power plan configured, you can export it with the minus export command. The
command requires the filename followed by the guid. It is best to copy and paste the
guid to the command line rather than typing it in as it is quite long.
If you want to delete a power plan you can do it with the minus delete parameter followed
by the guid. Notice that when I run the command I get a message saying the active power scheme
cannot be deleted. In order to delete this power plan, I would need to make one of the
other power plans the active plan first. I will once again list the plans, this time
using the minus L instead of the list switch. Both work the same.
Now that I have listed the plans, I can copy and paste the guid and this time delete one
of the plans that is not active. If you want to import a plan that you exported earlier,
you can do this with the parameter minus import followed by the filename. Notice however when
I enter in the filename I get an error saying file not found. In order to import this plan
I need the full path and filename even though I am in the correct directory. A nice fact
to remember otherwise you will spend hours pulling your hair out trying to work out why
the command does not work.
Lastly if you need additional information on the PowerCFG utility, you can run the parameter
slash question mark. This will give you the help information. The PowerCFG utility gives
you a lot of control over your settings. If you want to configure all the power settings
in your organization in one go you can use group policy.
The settings for power configuration are found in computer configuration, administrative
templates, system and power management. There are a lot of settings in here. I won’t worry
about going through them here because there are so many and a lot of them are self-explanation.
Well I hope you have enjoyed yet enough free training video for Windows 7. In the next
video I will look at how you can make remote connection back to your office when you are
out and about. For more free videos please see our web page or you tube channel.
Thanksfor watching.