As a general rule, Windows power settings are often a setting that goes unnoticed by many users, especially those with desktop PCs who do not depend on battery life like laptops. However, there are many options here that will allow you not only to customize the behavior of your hardware, but also to have better performance . In this article, we are going to tell you what power settings can do for you.
Normally, when you have a laptop, you do usually configure some of the power settings to your liking to customize its behavior, especially when you depend on its battery to have a greater autonomy. However, here you will also find interesting options for desktop PCs, and we will explain everything to you below.
Power settings in Windows 10
To access these settings you have several options: the first is to click on the Start button and type “Edit power plan”, from where it will take you directly to the options. The second is to access the Windows Control Panel, from there click on Power Options, and in this window that will open access “Change plan settings”. By default you will find at least two plans already pre-configured: balanced and high performance.
In the left area you will see some interesting options:
- Choose the behavior of the start / stop buttons: here you can configure what you want the computer to do when you press the power button on your PC. You can select Sleep, Turn off, Turn off the screen or do nothing. If your computer has a suspend button, you can also configure the same options.
- Choose when the screen turns off : this section is self-descriptive, since you will be able to select how much time of inactivity must pass for the screen to turn off automatically. It also allows you to choose how much idle time should elapse before the computer goes to sleep.
- Change how often the computer goes to sleep : this option takes you exactly the same section as the previous one.
Edit the power plan
Let’s see what options we have when we click on the button “Change plan settings” -> “Change advanced power settings”.
A new window will open in which you will find a large number of settings, and then we will see and explain each and every one of them.
- Hard disk : here we can configure how much time should pass before the system puts the hard disk or storage unit in sleep mode. For this to work with an SSD it must support the Devsleep function.
- Internet Explorer : we might think that this setting only affects the browser, but Windows also considers the conventional file explorer as such. Here we can configure the parameter “JavaScript timer frequency”, which by default is configured as Maximum Performance and so we recommend leaving it.
- Desktop background configuration: here you will only find a submenu called Presentation, which by default is configured as Available. This allows you to configure a folder with images to rotate as your desktop background.
- Wireless adapter configuration : if your computer has a wireless adapter, this option allows you to configure its power saving mode. By default it is configured as maximum performance and you should leave it that way to have the best performance over WiFi.
- Suspend : in this menu we find two options:
- Sleep after : allows you to configure how much idle time must elapse before the computer enters sleep mode.
- Allow wake-up timers : activating this setting allows that when certain programs need to perform a task, they can take the computer out of sleep mode.
- USB configuration: here we can configure whether or not we want to allow the selective suspension of USB. When the system detects that a USB-connected device has been idle for a while, you can disable it. We recommend disabling this option to avoid problems with some USB devices.
- On / off and lid buttons : here we find two submenus that are exactly what we saw earlier under the “Choose the behavior of the on / off buttons” menu.
- PCI Express – The option here is called “Link State Power Management”, and it works similarly to USB Selective Suspend – Allow idle PCI-Express devices to shut down. Again, we recommend disabling this option for better performance and to avoid issues.
- Processor power management : in this section we find three submenus:
- Minimum processor state : This option determines the performance state (or P state) that Windows will use for the processor. This will vary the processor’s clock speed and, if supported, its voltage and FSB speed. We recommend leaving this parameter at 100%.
- System cooling policy – Active cooling is set by default, which means that the fans are running. If you configure it as passive, the fans will turn off unless you have a fan management program loaded, which will prevail over this configuration.
- Maximum processor state : Same as the minimum state option, sets the maximum processor level. If you have over-temperature problems, you can lower this value so that the processor does not rise above certain values.
- Screen : here we can configure how much time of inactivity has to pass until the screen turns off automatically, entering sleep mode (only the screen, not the PC).
- Multimedia settings: in this last power setting we find three options:
- When sharing multimedia : we can configure (activate / deactivate) that the computer can go out of sleep mode if some other computer accesses a network share of it.
- Video playback quality compensation : here we can configure whether, when playing video, we want the quality of the video or energy saving to prevail. Recommended to select performance compensation for better performance, of course.
- When playing video : although it might seem that this menu would allow us to configure whether or not we want to allow the equipment to go into sleep mode when playing video, this is the case by default and what we can configure again is a video playback profile between optimizing quality , optimize savings or a balanced plan.