automationpower-managementwindows 7windows-vista
I like having my laptop run as long as humanly possible when running off battery, even if it means huge a compromise in performance.
Currently, whenever I'm on battery I have to manually switch my power plan to "Power Saver", and then switch back to "High Performance" when I'm plugged in.
Is there any way I could have my computer do this automatically?
Each power plan has settings for "on battery" and "plugged in" it will switch between the two automatically you don't need to create separate plans. See below if you need clarification:
If you insist on running multiple power plans that switch dynamically based on triggers Power Plan Assistant should do what you want. If neither of these is what you are looking for then you may need to clarify your question.
I was having a similar issue - each time I rebooted, the settings for my power plan were being changed. In my case the culprit was the ASUS AI suite. If you have this installed on your PC, that may be the cause in your case. You can prevent ASUS AI suite from starting on reboot as described here:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1139980/how-to-disable-ai-suite-from-startup
Manually Starting ASUS AI suite after your system is up was not changing my power plan settings, so I am still able to use this utility
Best Answer
There's nothing built into Windows that will allow you to do this, but I've seen a couple good 3rd party applications.
Aerofoil is my preferred of the two. It's very simple; all it does is switch your power plan to "power saver" and disables the Aero glassy desktop manager when you switch to battery, and does the inverse when you plug back in. It works great in Vista and 7.
Vista Battery Saver has a lot more features and can give you a bit more fine grained control. However, I've found it to be a bit less reliable -- doesn't seem to work 100% of the time for me. Also it doesn't work in Windows 7 at all -- it gets stuck halfway through installing.