A PC that is turned on a lot and often can lead to quite a bit of electricity. We walk you through the energy management in Windows 10 so that you can save costs and contribute to a better environment. This way you get an economical PC.
Let’s get started right away. Go to Start / Settings / System and Power management and sleep mode. You can immediately see the low-hanging fruit: Screen and Sleep mode. The first option allows you to turn off the display if you Windows 10 not actively used for a while. The second option puts Windows 10 to sleep for the same reason.
Take a look at how tight you can set these two options, because that’s how you immediately make the biggest energy-saving hit! If you choose Never (= always on) in both cases, you will relegate Windows 10 to the ultimate polluter, but that is also the other extreme.
Also click on the button Additional power settings. Here it is possible to choose a power plan or to adjust one. The schedule is recommended Balanced, but you can also choose High performance. The latter is immediately eliminated due to the high energy consumption, but Balanced is also not interesting in the context of maximum energy savings.
Click on the downward arrow next to the section View additional schedules. Then the third and for us interesting option becomes visible: Energy saving. In short, you can already select the energy management scheme Energy Saving to be ready with this workshop in one go. Still, let’s take a look at the button first Change the schedule settings.
The next step is to change the underlying settings of the power plan Energy Saver. Starting with it Screen (= default 5 minutes) and the Sleep mode (= default 10 minutes).
You can set these two options even tighter, but that is not enough for us. That’s why we click the button Change advanced power settings. Now you really get deep behind the scenes of Windows 10 power management.
Advanced power settings
Clicked through to the Advanced settings from the Power management you will be the first to see which scheme is active. At the moment that is Energy saving . Now you get to the place where it happens and you’re going to make hard choices that have everything to do with the way you use the PC. It literally becomes a matter of prioritizing. The dilemma: Performance versus energy savings! Depending on your system, you will find the following options:
– Hard Drive. Unlike an SSD, a hard drive is equipped with rotating parts. Running costs energy. Switching off the hard disk in the meantime results in a few seconds of boot time. If you can live with that, you can advance the hard drive ‘shutdown’ to 10 minutes here.
– At the part Internet Explorer you can set how much JavaScript is allowed to load the browser. Our proposal: Maximum energy savings.
– The option Desktop background settings cares about the slideshow you may have running as your desktop background. Not really necessary, right? Our proposal: interrupted.
– The option below is Wireless network adapter settings. Whether you can take advantage of this option depends on the hardware of your WiFi network.networkMap. So that will take some experimentation, because the wireless network must of course continue to function properly.
Our proposal: Moderate energy savings. Let’s see how this plays out. If you don’t like it, go back to Mmaximal performance.
– The part Sleep mode has at least two and possibly three sub-options: Sleep mode after, Hibernate after and Allow Activation Timers. You have already been able to arrange the first sub-option. Our proposal: 10 minutes. The sub-option Hibernate consumes even less energy than the Sleep mode but when using this option it will take longer for your pc to ‘wake up’ again. If that’s not a problem, set it here 10 minutes. Then go back to the Sleep mode and set it to Never. The activation timers apply to the Windows 10 Task Scheduler, among other things. Our proposal: Important Activation Timers Only.
– With the usb settings Is it possible to memorize power from USB ports/USB devices that are not being used? Don’t worry, the mouse and keyboard will always work. Our proposal: Switch.
– The video card, the sound card and perhaps something else can use PCI-Express. PCI-Express maintains constant contact with the connected hardware. Temporarily breaking that contact saves energy, but causes a small restart delay. Our proposal: Normal energy saving.
– Also the Processor power management has three sub-options: Minimum Processor Status, System Cooling Policy and Maximum processor status. Both processor statuses are self-explanatory. Our proposal: 5% and 75%. Admittedly, you don’t use the full potential of the CPU, but you save quite a bit of energy. Our cooling policy proposal: passive. In case of heat, the CPU is then first clocked down, before the fan is activated.
– The setting for the Display do you, like the timer for the Sleep modecan arrange earlier. Our proposal: 5 minutes.
Conclusion
We showed you ways to make Windows 10 run more economically and greener. It is a matter of practicality, because too much economy is of course at the expense of a pleasantly working PC. But now at least you have a guideline!
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