The power options for your computer can be changed through the Windows Control Panel. To access the Power Options settings, open your Control Panel and then select “System and Security” followed by “Power Options”.
On the left side, you will see a list of available power plans such as Balanced, Power Saver, and High Performance. Select the power plan that best suits you needs, or click “Create a Power Plan” to create a customized plan. If you’re creating a new plan, you can then choose a name, select the balance between performance and energy savings and choose when the system should automatically turn off the display or put the computer to sleep.
When you select a plan, you will see more detailed options on the right side of the window. Depending on your selection, you will have different options for changing settings such as hard drive idle time, display brightness, processor speed, USB selective suspend and sleep options.
For example, if you select the Balanced power plan, you can adjust the following settings:
Processor power management — This setting allows you to control how much power your processor uses. You can set it to run at full speed when you need maximum performance, or you can reduce the processor speed to save power.
Hard disk — You can set the time-out parameters to define when the hard drive should go into a low power state or turn off completely when it is idle.
Display — This option lets you adjust the display brightness, as well as how long the display should stay on before dimming or turning off.
USB selective suspend — This option determines whether USB devices should enter a low-power state when the computer is inactive.
Sleep — You can set the time to enter Sleep mode, when the computer should wake up, and other parameters related to the Sleep mode.
You can also access the Advanced Power Options, which provides additional settings related to your power plan. To access these settings, click the “Change advanced power settings” link. Here, you can customize many more settings related to various components on your computer, such as your network adapter, processor, hard disk and more.
The Power Options feature in Windows makes it easy to customize power settings for maximum performance or battery efficiency. From the Control Panel you can access a variety of settings to fine-tune power requirements for your computer. Be sure to take some time to review the available options and set them to the values that give you the best balance of performance and energy savings.