If you are a PC user and have MicrosoftWindows (in any of its versions) as an operating system, you most likely had to deal with the energy options occasionally; Despite this, most users only use them to configure how long it takes for the monitor to turn off when you’re not using the PC and nothing else, but you can get a lot more out of it when you know how to use them, and that’s why we’re here. : In this article we will tell you about Windows power options and what is each for?so that you can configure them properly according to your tastes and preferences.
Access to configure power options in Windows (whether it’s 7, 10 or 11) is very simple: you can click on Start and type “power options”, or you can go to the Control Panel and search there for its icon. Whichever way you access it, what we are going to see are the advanced options, accessible by clicking on “Change advanced power settings”.
Power Options in Windows
Power options are common to all the latest versions of the operating system, and you’ll only see a few changes if you have a laptop rather than a desktop (in our example, we’ll be looking at the latter). It does not matter which power plan you have selected, because precisely what we are going to do is modify it to configure it according to our preferences. The window you will see is as follows, then we will describe the available options.
- Hard disk: here we can select the option “turn off the hard disk after”, the function of which is self-explanatory. We can select the idle time that should elapse until the HDD (or SSD, of course) enters the Dev_sleep state. On a powerful PC, it is recommended to deactivate this option.
- Internet Explorer: the only option we will find here is called “JavaScript timer frequency”, and whatever PC you have, it is recommended to always have this option in “Maximum performance”.
- Desktop background settings: The only thing we can configure here is whether we want the “Presentation” mode to be available or not. This mode changes the desktop background as we have configured it.
- Wireless adapter configuration: In case you have a wireless adapter connected to the PC, you can configure the power saving options here. For better performance, we recommend leaving it on “Maximum performance”, otherwise we may experience connection problems with such an adapter.
- To suspend: Here we can configure the suspend mode of the equipment. We have several self-explanatory options:
- Suspend after: we will select the period of inactivity after which the computer will automatically suspend. We can select “Never” to disable it.
- Allow Hybrid Sleep: If you have enabled sleep on your computer, enabling this setting will activate a sleep mode in which session data is saved to RAM and the hard drive, so that it returns from sleep more quickly.
- Hibernate after: Just like the sleep mode, here we will define the hibernation mode.
- Allow wake-up timers: This setting allows us to set triggers or timers to wake up the session. For example, if we want the team to “wake up” at a certain time.
- usb setup: here we can select if we want the USB ports to be able to go into sleep mode. Typically, this is only useful when sleep or hibernate mode is active, otherwise going to sleep could cause the keyboard or mouse to stay on. Otherwise, we recommend disabling this setting.
- PCI express: here we can configure if we want the motherboard PCIe sockets to be able to go into power saving mode. An aggressive setup here could lead to a performance deficit on the graphics card, so we recommend disabling it.
- CPU power management: here we can configure minimum and maximum CPU power state. It is recommended to set 100% at both ends to ensure the best performance. Note: Setting the minimum to 100% does not mean that the CPU will be at 100% without doing anything, it just means that it “can” reach 100% under all necessary circumstances.
- Filter: Here we can configure the time in minutes of inactivity that should pass until the screen turns off automatically.
- Multimedia settings: This section is important, because here we can configure that the PC does not suspend even if it is idle if we have a movie on, for example. Imagine watching a long video and not touching the mouse for a while…it would be awkward if the playback was cut in the middle, wouldn’t it?
- When sharing media: this setting will prevent your computer from going to sleep if you are sharing files with other PCs on the local network.
- Video playback quality compensation: This tweak is used for Windows to intelligently decide to save power when we play a video.
- During video playback: This is the parameter we were talking about before, it is used to prevent the computer from going into suspension if we are playing a video.
Of course, if you have configured something and want to go back to the initial values, you have the “Restore plan defaults” button to leave the defaults.
