If your computer is part of a network at an organization—such as a school, government agency, or business—your organization's system administrator might have made certain settings unavailable or even removed them by using Group Policy. Group Policy is a feature of Windows that lets system administrators manage users' access to Windows features.
If you think that Group Policy is preventing you from changing a setting that you need to access, contact your system administrator.
Notes
(1) Windows hides power management settings that your computer doesn't support.
(2) By default, “Require a password on wakeup” is the only power setting that requires an administrator-level account to change. If you're logged on to a computer over a remote network connection (for example, using Remote Desktop Connection), you must have administrator-level user rights to change any of your computer's power settings.
Power plans
Power settings in this version of Windows are based on power plans. A power plan is a collection of hardware and system settings that manages how your computer uses power. Power plans can help you save energy, maximize system performance, or achieve a balance between the two. The three default power plans—Balanced, Power saver, and High performance—meet most people's needs. You can change settings for any of these plans, or, if these plans don't suit your needs, you can create your own plan by using one of these plans as a starting point.
Note: Your computer manufacturer may provide additional power plans.
Though the Balanced power plan is the active plan by default in this version of Windows, you can choose a different power plan as the active plan. If you decide you want to change the active plan back to Balanced, you can do so at any time.
Balanced
This plan balances energy consumption and system performance by adapting the computer's processor speed to your activity.
• Balanced: This profile provides the best balance between power savings and performance. Most notebook users will want to select this one when they're unplugged.
Power saver
This plan saves power on your mobile PC by reducing system performance. Its primary purpose is to maximize battery life.
Power saver: This profile allows for the highest level of energy savings -- the most aggressive CPU throttling, the quickest hard-drive timeout, and so on. People who are on a notebook and away from a power source for a fairly long amount of time will want to choose this while they're traveling.
High performance
This plan provides the highest level of performance on your mobile PC by adapting processor speed to your work or activity and by maximizing system performance.
High performance: This is the best plan for a plugged-in computer, since it still retains some energy-saving functions but for the most part lets things run full speed.
The drop-down at the top lets you choose which power plan you're editing; by default, it'll be whatever one you were working with when you clicked Change advanced power settings.
Additional settings:
(1) Require a password on wakeup: This lets you choose whether or not you need to supply a password to the system after it comes up out of hibernation.
(2) Hard Disk: Turn off hard disk after __ minutes: This controls how long the hard disk(s) will idle before spinning down.
(3) Wireless adapter settings: Controls the level of power savings for wireless adapters (if any) installed in the computer. Note that the more power savings you use with a wireless adapter, the weaker the signal or throughput might be.
(4) Power buttons and lid: Controls the behavior of the power button and the start menu power button.
(5) PCI Express | Link State Power Management: Governs the power management state for the PCI Express bus (if one is present in your computer). The more the power savings, the greater the impact on performance.
(6) Processor power management: This lets you control how much to throttle the CPU, which is mainly used when you're on a notebook PC but can also be used with a desktop that has intelligent processor power management for reduced power consumption. There does seem to be a lower limit to how effective the throttling is, but I have not yet determined what it is. (But in short, no, you can't get 200 hours of battery life by setting both minimum and maximum CPU to 1%.)
(7) Search and Indexing: Controls how aggressively the computer performs indexing operations for the search engine.
(8) Sleep: This controls how long the system idles before going to sleep, or before hibernating completely.
(9) Display: This controls how long the display remains on when the system is idle. Adaptive display will lengthen the wait time before turning off the display if the system is woken up often.
(10) Multimedia settings: Controls how media sharing affects power management -- for instance, you can allow the system to keep from idling to sleep mode so that remote multimedia users aren't disconnected.
(11) Battery: Controls the actions taken when the battery level reaches certain markers, and what those markers are (i.e., if the "critical battery level" marker is 10% of available power or as little as 3%).
Monday, October 22, 2007
Green Computing
From Windows Vista Blog (Dec. 2006):
A typical Pentium 4 PC with a 17" LCD monitor draws about 102.6 watts of power (think about a 100 watt light bulb). That same PC and display in a sleep state draws only 5.6 watts, or 97 fewer watts.
If you figure that a PC is used for active work for 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks per year, that is 2,600 operating hours. With 8,760 hours in a year (365*24), there are actually 6,160 potential idle hours per year. Since sleep mode uses 97 fewer watts than full power mode, the total savings is 597 kWh per year -- and by the way, the impact is obviously even greater (760 kWh) if you use a CRT monitor since they draw more power than LCDs.
The paper uses an estimate of $0.0931 per kWh from the US Department of Energy, so for a home user with one PC, the savings amounts to $55.63/year (more if the PC is used less than 10 hours a day).
While that is great saving for a home user, think about an enterprise with 10,000 desktops where the potential cost savings would be $556,300/year -- and we haven’t even tried to estimate the HVAC savings. With IT budgets becoming sequentially tighter year over year, it's nice to be able to have this kind of impact. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that there is also a significant environmental impact as well.
The EPA estimates that every kWh of electricity generates 1.55 pounds carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions so each PC that moves to Windows Vista generates 926 fewer pounds of carbon dioxide or about 8% of what the EPA estimates that a typical car generates in the course of a year-- so for every 12 and a half PCs that are running with Windows Vista’s new power management capabilities, it’s like having one less car on the road.
A typical Pentium 4 PC with a 17" LCD monitor draws about 102.6 watts of power (think about a 100 watt light bulb). That same PC and display in a sleep state draws only 5.6 watts, or 97 fewer watts.
If you figure that a PC is used for active work for 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks per year, that is 2,600 operating hours. With 8,760 hours in a year (365*24), there are actually 6,160 potential idle hours per year. Since sleep mode uses 97 fewer watts than full power mode, the total savings is 597 kWh per year -- and by the way, the impact is obviously even greater (760 kWh) if you use a CRT monitor since they draw more power than LCDs.
The paper uses an estimate of $0.0931 per kWh from the US Department of Energy, so for a home user with one PC, the savings amounts to $55.63/year (more if the PC is used less than 10 hours a day).
While that is great saving for a home user, think about an enterprise with 10,000 desktops where the potential cost savings would be $556,300/year -- and we haven’t even tried to estimate the HVAC savings. With IT budgets becoming sequentially tighter year over year, it's nice to be able to have this kind of impact. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that there is also a significant environmental impact as well.
The EPA estimates that every kWh of electricity generates 1.55 pounds carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions so each PC that moves to Windows Vista generates 926 fewer pounds of carbon dioxide or about 8% of what the EPA estimates that a typical car generates in the course of a year-- so for every 12 and a half PCs that are running with Windows Vista’s new power management capabilities, it’s like having one less car on the road.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Microsoft Office Version Conflict
Inevitably, when Microsoft publishes new versions of its dominant Office software application suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), businesses and organizations end up with a mixture of old and new versions--at least for awhile.
This time around, Microsoft's new version, Office 2007, is not backward compatible, but don't lose hope!
Here are some words of wisdom from Carrie Sallee to help you cope:
"Having trouble opening certain Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files? The reason is that more and more computer users are using the new Microsoft Office 2007 version. This version uses a new file format which is supposed to reduce file size, improve security and reliability, and enhance integration with external sources. What this means is that older version of MS Office (like so many people are using) can’t read the newer versions without using a converter. Word, Excel, and Powerpoint 2007 have a new file format all based on XML. The extensions will change from .DOC, .XLS, .PPT to .DOCX, .XLSX, .PPTX.
Also, icons have a slightly different look.
To resolve version conflicts, simply install the "Compatibility Pack" and you will be able open, edit, and save files using the file formats new to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.
If you are one using the new Office 2007, we strongly suggest you save your file to a lower version so others who don’t have Office 2007 can read it.
Just do this:
· Click the File menu,
· Choose "Save As"
· Save it as a Word 97-2003 Document
This time around, Microsoft's new version, Office 2007, is not backward compatible, but don't lose hope!
Here are some words of wisdom from Carrie Sallee to help you cope:
"Having trouble opening certain Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files? The reason is that more and more computer users are using the new Microsoft Office 2007 version. This version uses a new file format which is supposed to reduce file size, improve security and reliability, and enhance integration with external sources. What this means is that older version of MS Office (like so many people are using) can’t read the newer versions without using a converter. Word, Excel, and Powerpoint 2007 have a new file format all based on XML. The extensions will change from .DOC, .XLS, .PPT to .DOCX, .XLSX, .PPTX.
Also, icons have a slightly different look.
To resolve version conflicts, simply install the "Compatibility Pack" and you will be able open, edit, and save files using the file formats new to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.
If you are one using the new Office 2007, we strongly suggest you save your file to a lower version so others who don’t have Office 2007 can read it.
Just do this:
· Click the File menu,
· Choose "Save As"
· Save it as a Word 97-2003 Document
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