The community Taskforce initiative has now come to a close.
Thanks to everyone who made thoughtful and genuine contributions to the website.
All submissions will be kept publically available for the forseeable future for reference purposes.

This website is part of the community Taskforce initiative

Submission details

6 +21/-15 votes

Power plan should automatically switch to lower power consumption plan when laptop is running on battery

Submitted by Bob Huba on June 9, 2009 to Annoyance, Usability

When using laptop w/o power connected I keep forgetting to manally change power plan and the batter runs down too fast

Have the power plan automatically switch to balanced or power saver plan - user choice - when power cable is unplugged and laptop is running on battery. Also automatically return to high performance plan when power cable (re)connected.

Ok- based on comments let me suggest a better/different solution.

The defualt "on battery" settings for the High Performance power plan are pretty much exactly the same as the on "plugged in" settings which does not seem logical to me as when I am on battery I want to default to saving the battery not high performance.

So I sugest the default settings for all of the "on battery" plans ought to be optomized for battery life and then the user can tweak them to what they want.

Medium

Medium

Not fixed

Discussion (4 comments)

BigKid wrote on January 11, 2010, 9:59am

Non-issue. This, and much more is easy as 1-2-3 with a free program named Power Plan Assistant for Windows 7. I'm very devoted to this software, because it totally fixed W7 power management glitches for me.

See www.powerplan7.com

AllUltima wrote on January 12, 2010, 6:37am

You aren't understanding the way you are supposed to use the power plan. EACH power plan has DIFFERENT behavior for plugged in and for battery.

So make 1 custom power plan that has High Performance settings when plugged in, but is frugal when on battery mode. Then you will never need to manually switch anything.

romkyns wrote on March 26, 2010, 12:34pm

>>> So I sugest the default settings for all of the "on battery" plans ought to be optomized for battery life and then the user can tweak them to what they want.

This makes no sense. I select "High performance" to get, erm, *high performance* even when I'm running on battery.

You might also be interested in...