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Create a Custom Power Plan

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A power plan is a collection of hardware and system settings that manages how computers use and conserve power. A power plan is also known as a power scheme. You can create custom power plans that are optimized for specific computers.

You can customize the default plans for your systems, create new plans that are based on the existing plans, or create a new power plan from scratch.

Optimizing Windows power plans can help improve battery life. However, a single poorly performing application, device, or system feature can significantly reduce battery life. For information about factors that influence battery life, see Managing Battery Life and Power Consumption Overview.

Creating a customized power plan

  1. Open the Control Panel.

  2. Click Hardware and Sound, and then select Power Options.

  3. The Power Options Control Panel opens, and the power plans appear.

  4. Click Create a power plan.

  5. Follow the on-screen instructions to create and customize a power plan file that is based on an existing plan. Name your power plan OutdoorPlan.

Note

You can manage most common power plan settings through Control Panel. To fine-tune settings that do not appear in Control Panel, see Fine-Tune a Custom Power Plan.

Listing the available power plans

On your technician computer, at an elevated command prompt, run powercfg to list the power plans on your system:

powercfg -LIST

The computer will return the list of available power plans. In the following example, these plans are Balanced, Power saver, and OutdoorPlan.

Existing Power Schemes (* Active)
-----------------------------------
Power Scheme GUID: {guidPlan1}  (Balanced) *
Power Scheme GUID: {guidPlan2}  (Power saver)
Power Scheme GUID: {guidPlan3}  (OutdoorPlan)

Note the GUIDs that are listed next to the power plans that you want to capture.

Deploying a power plan

After you have created power plans that work for your system, you can deploy the power plans to your destination computers.

To export the OutdoorPlan power plan that you created on your technician computer, open an elevated command prompt, and then type the following

powercfg -EXPORT C:\OutdoorPlan.pow {guidPlan-New}

This creates a new power plan file.

To learn more, see Set the Default Power Plan.

Managing Battery Life and Power Consumption Overview

Test Battery Life and Power Consumption

Set the Default Power Plan