As you may know, your computer can run under a variety of different power schemes. A power scheme is a collection of hardware and system settings that manage how your computer uses power. They are typically used the most with laptops, where it's more crucial to trade off between performance and battery preservation. Even a desktop machine can use them, though. There are three schemes that come with Windows by default. They are Balanced, High Performance, and Power Saver, and you can create others if none of these suits you.
There is a command utility in Windows called Powercfg, which provides a great deal of control over your power schemes. (You can use the GUI for much of this functionality, too, but a lot of people prefer using the command line.) Powercfg takes numerous switches to tell it what you want to do regarding your power schemes. To see all of the switches available to Powercfg, invoke it with the "-HELP" (or "-?") switch.
For this tip we want to delete a power scheme. First, we'll get a list of the available power schemes (covered under another tip). (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1. Powercfg -list.
Let's create a new power scheme by duplicating the Balanced scheme (covered under another tip). (See Figure 2.)
Figure 2. Powercfg -duplicatescheme.
We could now rename the newly created Balanced scheme and tweak it to our heart's content. After running with it for a while, we may decide we won't need it any more so we want to delete it. The command to do that is "-DELETE" (or "-D"), and you just specify the GUID of the scheme to be deleted: (See Figure 3.)
Figure 3. Powercfg -delete.
This tip (13486) applies to Windows 7, 8, and 10.
This tip shows you how to use the command-line Powercfg utility to query a given power scheme from your current environment.
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2016-10-25 11:27:19
Brian Hershman
A minor point: in W10pro x64 at least, powercfg.exe will not run under the GUI!
2016-10-25 11:18:46
Brian Hershman
I recently replaced my C: drive by an SSD while keeping my existing Windows 10 set-up. Before that I had a power scheme that permitted hibernation and showed it in the Start button menu.
Since the change the set-up looks the same but "Hibernate" appears to shut-down the system so that, when I turn the power on, it will not resume but boots up again from the beginning.
Is that likely to be a problem that I could solve with Powercfg?
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