Power Management

Windows 2000 Professional allows you to configure and monitor power management features and set power management options called power schemes by using Power Options in Control Panel. You can configure optional features, such as support for hibernation, and you can monitor the status of power components, such as the remaining power in your laptops battery.

Windows 2000 Professional includes the following features for power management:

Simplified, Single-user Interface    This includes a power meter, low-battery alarms, Power Options in Control Panel, Hibernate, and Standby in the Shutdown dialog box.

Instant Access With Standby Mode    While on standby, your monitor and disk drives turn off, and your computer uses less power. When you want to use the computer again, it comes out of standby quickly. Standby is particularly useful for conserving battery power in portable computers. ACPI-enabled computers have a feature that toggles between power and sleep modes that you can access from a button on the front of the computer or from the operating system.

Note

When you plan to be away from your computer for a long period of time (more than a couple of hours), you should put it in hibernate rather than standby mode. If you use standby for an extended period of time, you run the risk of draining the battery.

Automatic Standby After Inactivity    You can tell your system to automatically go into standby mode when it detects that no activity has taken place for a specified interval of time. This conserves power because it does not require that you remember to manually put your computer in standby mode.

Wake Events    Windows 2000 Professional enables the system to automatically wake to handle events, such as backing up the system, downloading e-mail, and defragmenting the hard disk. This is done through Task Scheduler. For more information about Task Scheduler, see Introduction to Configuration and Management in this book.

Enhanced Application Messaging    This feature allows applications to adjust their behavior appropriately for changes in battery state.

Windows 2000 Professional provides power schemes that configure the system so that it turns off monitors and disk drives, and goes on standby, after predetermined periods of system inactivity. The following set of power schemes is built into Windows 2000 Professional:

Home/Office Desk    For desktop computers. This scheme is installed with Typical/Compact/Custom Setup options.

Portable/Laptop    Optimized for portable computers. This scheme includes aggressive settings for running on batteries (the AC settings are the same as desktop). This scheme is installed with Typical/Compact/Custom/Portable Setup options.

Presentation    This scheme prevents the computer from going into Standby mode. It is intended for use with computer presentations, when you need the computer display to stay on.

Always On    For use with personal servers. This scheme is similar to Home/Office, but has the standby timer disabled and disk drive timer increased. It is installed when you install a server.

Minimal Power Management    In this scheme, some power management features, such as timed hibernation or a timed event that can put the disk drive in a sleep mode, are disabled.

Max Battery    To conserve as much battery power as possible, this scheme allows a relatively short time of inactivity before it places the computer in a power saving state.

If none of the built-in schemes is appropriate, you can change the properties of a built-in scheme or create an entirely new scheme through the Power Options Properties dialog box.