Manage your PC's power

Follow these PCAnswers tips to set up efficient power management techniques to bring down your carbon footprint or squeeze more battery life from your laptop!

1. Ditch the screensaver
Screensavers look pretty, but modern LCD monitors don’t need them to protect the screen – a better energy saving technique is to set the monitor to switch itself off after the same period you’d normally allow the screensaver to kick in – say five or ten minutes. The added bonus is that you’ll be extending the monitor’s life too. Set this from the Power Options Control Panel.

2. Hard drive use
Excessive use of the hard drive consumes more power as well as affects performance – make sure your drive is regularly defragged, add more RAM to your PC to reduce the load Windows places on your drive and let the drive spin down to conserve energy around the same time as your monitor powers off.

3. Tweak advanced settings
Check your wireless adapter and USB ports aren’t consuming more than their fair share of energy; Vista users can change this and other power settings by opening the Power Options Control Panel and clicking Change plan settings followed by Change advanced settings. XP users need to open Device Manager, access the device’s properties by double-clicking its entry and look under the Power Management or Advanced tab for power-saving options.

4. Reduce monitor brightness
Cut your monitor’s brightness settings to reduce its energy consumption – laptop users running on battery power will find this an excellent way to eke even more life out of their battery. Laptop users should also avoid using the DVD drive when running on battery power – ejecting any discs before switching to the battery will also prevent the drive spinning up and consuming power too.

5. Custom power plans
Take the time to set up customised power plans for different usages – a high-powered plan for games for example coupled with a plan for playing music that immediately powers off your monitor and spins down your hard drive without ever putting your PC to sleep. Both XP and Vista enable you to create your own custom plans, but only XP lets you place an icon in the Taskbar that enables you to quickly switch between power schemes with a single click.

6. Go to sleep
Don’t be afraid to put your PC in standby or sleep mode after a short period of inactivity – no more than 30 minutes. Again set this from the Power Options Control Panel – to remove the password prompt on resuming, look under the Advanced tab in XP or “Change advanced settings” in Vista (it’s under Additional Settings, and you’ll need to be an Administrator to do so).