Scheduled power management setting changes

[steven017]

I've looked around these forums, done some searching, and cannot find any references to this. Assuming other might be interested, I thought I'd post a relatively simple idea I'm using for scheduling changes to my power management settings.

You might wonder why I would want to do this. The simple answer is I want to turn the standby timer on and off at different times of the day so that my computer will or will not go into standby mode, without and need for user interaction. Specifically, I want my Skype phone available on my SageTV box at certain times of the day.

Here's how it accomplished. This info may be widely known--but I had no idea I could do it.

Power management in Windows can be changed via the command line using the powercfg.exe utility. Note that it is the ".exe" file and not ".cpl" file. One is the command line utility while the other is a control panel.

To change the amount of time until your desktop switches into standby mode, you need to create a task using the windows task scheduler.

The target file is c:\Windows\System32\powercfg.exe. You also need to add the following to the end of this path: -change -standby-timeout-ac TIME, where time is the amount of time you want windows to wait until going into standby mode.

So, as an example, c:\Windows\System32\powercfg.exe -change -standby-timeout-ac 20 will set your computer to go into standby in 20 minutes. A setting of 0 will disable standby mode.

This should work as is for Vista, at least it did for me. In XP Pro, I had to specify the power management scheme. The easy way for me to do this was to create a new scheme with a simple name in the power management control panel. For example, I could name it "steve."

For this scheme, the new command would look something like this:

c:\Windows\System32\powercfg.exe -change steve -standby-timeout-ac 20

So, now you can go crazy changing your power management setting whenever you like.

A couple final notes, these commands work in English version of windows that have at least XP SP2. The commands may be slightly different in different language versions of Windows (eg., the Japanese version seems to use a "/" instead of a "-"). An easy way to check the appropriate command is to open a command prompt and type "powercfg /?". This will show the help file with the appropriate command syntax.

Good luck.

Steve