June 17th, 2008
10 top Vista tweaks, part 2
10. Master power management
It took 18 months’ worth of updated drivers and patches, many of them rolled into Service Pack 1, but most of the sleep and hibernation issues that plagued Vista in its early days are fixed now. If you haven’t yet taken advantage of some of the new power management features in Vista, these tweaks might help you save some money on your electric bill and keep your office a degree or two cooler.
If you previously used power management settings in Windows XP, you’ll need to learn about hybrid sleep, which is a Vista-only setting that improves performance for desktop systems. The trouble with using XP’s Stand By mode on a desktop PC is that it doesn’t offer a safety net. If you have a power outage, or accidentally hit the power button or pull the plug, your saved state (and any open files that you hadn’t yet saved) are gone in a few milliseconds. The alternative, hibernation, saves the contents of memory to a file on the hard disk, which saves your data files but leads to a delay when you resume.
That’s where hybrid sleep comes in. When this mode is enabled, putting the PC to Sleep saves a hibernation file and then puts the system into a low-power mode similar to the old Stand By. When you’re ready to resume, you should be back to work in a few seconds. If the power shuts down, no information is lost; when you restart, the system finds the hibernation file and uses it to resume. The only penalty you pay for using hybrid sleep is that the initial sleep action takes slightly longer than usual.
You don’t need hybrid sleep on a notebook, of course. In that case, the system automatically switches from Sleep to Hibernate if the battery level gets to a Critical level where data loss might occur.
On desktop and notebook systems, I typically tweak three settings. All of them are available from the Power Options dialog box in Control Panel:
- Power plan. Except under unusual circumstances, I use the built-in Balanced plan, or the equivalent plan provided by the PC or notebook OEM. (For a Sony VAIO, this is VAIO Optimized; for a Dell, it’s Dell Recommended.) On a desktop PC, you might be tempted to use High Performance. The only reason to choose this option is if you want to make sure the system doesn’t shift into a lower processor mode or go to sleep while you’re performing a background task.
- What the Power buttons do. On notebooks, I like to set the power button to Hibernate and use the lid and sleep button to go to sleep. On desktops, I set the power button to Sleep as well.
- Advanced Power Options. The Advanced Settings tab for each power plan lets you fine-tune what that plan does. For desktops, make sure Hybrid sleep is on and Hibernate is set to Never. For notebooks, hybrid sleep should be off.
Of course, you know that you can power down the system from the Start menu by clicking the arrow to the right of the Lock button and then choosing Shut Down from the menu. If you want that option be a bit more accessible, create a shortcut using the Shutdown command. The command shutdown /s gives you a 60-second warning; shutdown /p /f forces all running programs to close and shuts down with no further warning. If you change your mind after initiating the shutdown sequence with the /s switch, you can abort it using (naturally) the /a switch: shutdown /a.
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 06/17/08
