John Galea's Windows 95 Power Management Page

Introduction

Power management can be rather confusing to understand given the different levels that it occurs on, and the different devices that are supported for power management. In the end, once you have it all figured out, do you really care? After all on a desktop it's not like when you on a laptop when every last watt of power is coming from a limited battery. The amount of money you save is probably not even measurable. That EPA thought is at a much grander level. You also need to keep in mind, for each power management mechanism, there is a break even point. As you can imagine if you turned off your hard drive or monitor every minute or two, the wear and tear on them would cost you (and the environment) far more than you save. You need to find a level of power management you are comfortable with. That said, lets dive into power management.

Here I am only going to discuss desktop power management. Not laptops. Laptops generally have a lot of code written for them to all complete power management that is not supported on desktops. This would include items such as a complete dump of memory (RAM) to the hard disk so that the memory can be powered off as well. Some companies such as IBM have included some of these deep power management features on desktops, but this would be the exception, not the rule.

BIOS

Bios (or CMOS setup as it is sometimes called) is the primary place where your power management is defined. Additionally, BIOS is where you define when you want to come out of power management. Typically you would come out of power management if a keyboard was hit, a mouse was moved or the phone rang. In the office there may be other events such as network events as well. You also may be able to specify a time to come out of power management. Your first step will be to go into your BIOS setup and set your power management to levels you think are reasonable.

Devices for Power management

So what part of my computer supports power management. Generally speaking there are three areas which are the most common place for power management:
  1. your processor
  2. hard disks
  3. monitor power management

Windows 95 Power management

Ok now all this is defined we can finally talk about Windows 95 power management. To see if power management is installed on your system go into My computer, Control Panel. Look for an icon called Power. If it is not there, we need to check if APM (Advanced Power Management) is supported and enabled. Go into My computer, Control panel, System, then Device manager tab, then pick on the + beside System devices. Look for Advanced Power Management. If it is not there, then your system does not support it. If it is select the APM, and then select Properties, then Settings tab. Check if it is enabled.

If power management was not enabled in BIOS when you did your install or if you upgraded your motherboard from one that did not to one that did, and probably a number of other reasons, then Windows will not install the Power icon into your control panel. I checked about and the word from Microsoft is that to install this there is only one way. Enable the power management in BIOS, enable it in system properties and ... Reinstall windows. You have got to be kidding. Nope that's the word, and it seems to be right. I tried everything I could think of to get around this and eventually gave in and reinstalled Windows and there it was, the Power Icon.

Windows 95 Processor Power Management Settings

Go into My computer, Control panel, Power. You have two items your can change here. One is the Power Management mode Off, Standard and Advanced. You'll have to play to find the one that works best for you. The second item if you can have Windows show a suspend choice on the shutdown window. This allow you to put your processor, and local bus cards into suspend mode manually. This works well and with the BIOS set it will come of of suspend quite well too. As mentioned earlier though, I have not been successful in getting the system to enter suspend on it's own in Windows. Works fine outside Windows (BIOS is fully in control at that point).

The values specified for your processor power management in your BIOS will be allowed to work with this set properly in Windows.

Windows 95 Hard disk Spin down

This is a straight whatever set in your BIOS and Windows neither controls, nor interferes with these settings.

Display Power Management

There are two ways to control power management of your display. The new way and the old way.

In the old way (Windows 3.x method) the screen saver you chose either supported DPMS or didn't. If it did then you simply enable and set the power management you want.

The new way is that you tell Windows 95 that your monitor supports power management by selecting My computer, Control panel, Display, Settings tab, Change display type button, and click the check box that says you monitor is energy star compliant. This is EPA term for a monitor that supports DPMS and is below the 30 watt number. Once this is set the Energy savings features should be able to be defined in My computer, Control panel, Display, Screen saver tab.

Summary

In then end, once you have figured it all out, do you really care, well for me it's just something that was there that I wanted to explore and work correctly. Enjoy, hope this helped and be sure to email me if you liked what you read. Of course suggestions are welcome, criticisms can be sent to someone else, anyone else ...

Warning

If you are having trouble getting your power management working correctly there are a number of programs that can interfere with power management. Sound execution on the command to enter manual suspend will cause suspend to start and immediately come back out of suspend.

Deskmenu from Microsoft seems to interfere with both hard disk power management and display power management. I'm sure other programs will too, so if power management is working as expected, try to start removing programs from memory to see if you can find the offending program.
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