Good morning! No wait, it's not good morning yet. I still need coffee. Just a moment, let me have some coffee first, then it will be good morning.

No wait, don't talk to me yet.

Not yet, getting there. Still sleepy.

I'm about to wake up.

Here we go, coffee is done. Now I'm ready to talk to you.

Sometimes, it feels like that's just what your computer needs to get going too. A cup of coffee. Digital coffee. A Joe of numbers. Filled with hexadecimal digits. Or maybe base-64. That sounds good, actually. Base-64 encoded coffee. It would probably be a medium strength brew. Perfect pick me up to get though the day. Feed that to me, pass it through to my computer, we'll both wake up and be ready for a productive day. Not that I would ever let my computer sleep, that is.

Of all features that computers have, sleep mode is about my least favorite of them. I set my system to work doing something, then I walk away and have a cup of coffee. When I finish my coffee, I come back and tap a key to make the screen light up. Goodness no, it has made no progress at all on the task I have given it. The moment I press a key, it wakes up from sleep mode and continues its task. Come on, computer, you don't get tired and you don't have better things to do, why couldn't you have continued on with your task while I was away? Oh right, I forgot to plug you in. You need to save power. Power modes are often different when the system is plugged in vs when it's running on battery.

Running on battery, that's an idea I'm still getting used to. More and more, people use laptops and phones, and all our computing is battery backed. It's a nice thing, because then the power can go out and you don't need to worry about losing your work. You'll just worry about how much battery you have left, and then make sure you save your things and shutdown before the battery dies. It can be annoying though when the system is not running on battery, and it goes to sleep anyway. Why do you need to save power when you are plugged into the wall? I don't think my system is going to drain the local power grid dry. Probably not.

In Windows, you can use the powercfg tool to set and change the power modes. Run this command: "powercfg /aliases". Then you get a list of aliases of pre-configured power profiles you can choose from. The first three are the most interesting. There's SCHEME_MAX, SCHEME_MIN, and SCHEME_BALANCED. There's a GUID associated with each one. Your default is probably going to be the balanced scheme. You get a good balance of performance features and power saving features in your system. What if you don't give two cares about saving power? Let's say you want to suck all the power possible and make your system as performant as possible. That's generally what I want. If I tell my system to do something, I want it to suck up all the power it can and complete the task as soon as it can. That's why I'll set my power profile to SCHEME_MIN. You'll need to use the GUID associated with the scheme when you set it. Just run the command "powercfg /setactive " and pass it the GUID you want.

But wait, you unplug the system from the wall, now you are on battery. You need to take your laptop around somewhere, for who knows how long. You can't afford for the battery to die right away. Set your power profile to SCHEME_MAX. There you go, sweet power saving relief. Your battery will last much longer now.

Max power saving for battery, min power saving for plugged in. For that min power saving, the high performance mode, you might want to add some external cooling factor. Maybe a pad with cooling fans, or just point a little fan on it to help keep it cool. Also make sure the internal fans and all your ports are free of dust. Apart from that consideration, there's never actually a time that I ever would care to set my power profile to "balanced." Who wants balance? Let's work extremes! Max performance power when plugged in, max battery saving when not! Carbon footprint? What's that?

I storm off out of the room, carrying my laptop with me, in power saving mode of course.

Moments later, I storm back into the room. "And another thing!" I point directly at you. "Why are you carrying your laptop open?"

I see people walking around with their laptops open all the time. Now stop that. Aside from the fact that it looks silly, there's a high risk of dropping it when you do that. The weight of the device is more spread out. There's more places where you need to tend to holding and balancing it. The screen is is the more delicate part of the system, so you need to be careful holding that part. Some people would carry it with the screen up, balancing the laptop in one arm. No, I yell in my mind, don't do that! You are sure to drop the thing holding it like that. And in fact, that often happens, dropping your laptop while holding it in this balancing act with the screen open. I can somewhat understand. You don't want the thing to fall asleep. If it sleeps, the things it's doing stops, and then when you open the screen again, it starts working. What's worse is that sometimes sleep mode doesn't recover. The blasted thing can fall asleep and never wake up again. So? Find the lid settings. Change it so it doesn't fall asleep when you close the lid. Don't drop the laptop.