Vista Power Options Vista Addons and Applications Discuss Vista Power Options in the Windows Vista forums; Vista provides three power options to choose from: Balanced, Power saver and High performance. Which one should you choose? It depends on whether you want to complete an intensive task ...

[felix8406]

Vista provides three power options to choose from: Balanced, Power saver and High performance. Which one should you choose? It depends on whether you want to complete an intensive task quickly, you want to let Vista decide the best performance, or if you are using a laptop and need to save battery power.

If you are running a laptop on batteries, you may want to use the Power Saver mode. Your laptop may run slower, as the CPU is capped at about 40-50% of its capacity.

Running your PC in Balanced Mode, give you the best of both settings; Power Saver and High Performance. CPU utilization is control from 5-100%.
If you are running a high intensive game or working with various documents at once, you may choose the High Performance, which will pegged the CPU at 100%.

Note that if you are running your laptop on battery power, the battery will be drained much faster than when using the balanced or power saver modes.

[felix8406]

As I wrote and posted about the Vista Power Options, I set my laptop to High Performance. It worked fine, but when I tried to close the lid, it did not go into sleep mode.

To fix this, go to Power Options > Change plan settings > Select Change advanced power settings > Expand Sleep tab > Sleep After > Next to Plugged in: select time in minutes before Vista places the PC to sleep.

Now go to Power buttons and lid > Lid close action > Make sure Sleep is selected next to Plugged in. If not, select it.

[Wiggles]

When I first use Vista without all the updates switching from Balanced or High Performance to Power Saver, the aero interface used to switch transpracy off but now it doesn't for some wierd reason.

Guessing it is just a Vista issue?

By the way, thanks for the info on the power options handy since I work on a laptop.
When plugged in High Performance is selected, and when running on battery power I just use Power Saver.
Don't think I've ever used Balanced before.

[felix8406]

You may want to read this article tittled, Aero and battery life: http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/wi...tery-life.aspx

You may also want to take a look at Battery Power Saver Plus: http://www.codeplex.com/vistabattery.

[felix8406]

Originally Posted by felix8406

...when I tried to close the lid, it did not go into sleep mode.

To fix this, go to Power Options > Change plan settings > Select Change advanced power settings > Expand Sleep tab > Sleep After > Next to Plugged in: select time in minutes before Vista places the PC to sleep.

Now go to Power buttons and lid > Lid close action > Make sure Sleep is selected next to Plugged in. If not, select it.

A user indicated that even after performing the above steps, his laptop would not got into a sleep mode. There are two things you can try, use the Balanced Mode or lower your CPU Maximum Processor State. Select Change advanced power settings and under Processor power management, next to On battery, select a less percentage.

Try different percentages, you can always come back to the star by clicking on Restore plan defaults if things don't work out the way you expected.