Video Transcript

Hi, this is Greg Shields. I'm going to show you how you can Group Policy to adjust the Power Plan of your computers. You know, everyone today is trying to save money. One of the great ways you can save money relatively easily is by setting your computers to a lower power state when they are not being used.

One of the ways you can do that is by adjusting your Power Policies through a Group Policy Object. You'll see I've created one here. If I go and Edit this Group Policy Object I can bring up this other window I can actually modify my Power Plan's in two different locations. The first is down her under Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Power Management. What I'm looking for is to select an active Power Plan. If I double click this, you'll see I can enable the plan and chose between one of the two Power Plans that are available, either High Performance or Power Saver. Setting Power Saver here will actually go through and set the Power Saver Plan. I then adjust the Power Saver Plan here under Sleep Setting, and for example, specify the System Sleep Timeout (Plugged In). Once I do that, I chose Enabled and set the System Sleep Timeout. Remember, this is a matter of seconds, not minutes, before the system goes to sleep. What this allows me to do is set the value to fifteen minutes. So if my users are not near their computers, then their computers will immediately go to sleep and save me on power.

As you can imagine, doing this here inside of Group Policy means that I have turn this on all the time. My users might not really appreciate having their computers going to sleep if they turn away for fifteen minutes. What I'd really like to do is set the Sleep Timeout to occur at a different value at the end of the day as it would in the middle of the day. Maybe I'd rather set it for fifteen minutes after work hours. But during the workday I'd rather set it for four hours. I cannot do that in Group Policy but I can do that in Group Policy Preferences, down here under Power Options.

What I need to do is create a new Power Plan here under Power Options. You'll see here I'm going to choose the Power Saver plan and under the Power Saver plan I'm going to save it sleep after 15 minutes, leaving the On battery just for zero for now. Once I have configured the Power Plan, I then need to also set it as the active Power Plan. Once I have done that I then need to configure when this plan will be applied. I can do so under the Common tab, by choosing Item-level targeting.

In the Targeting Editor what I am looking for is Time Range. Now again this is what I am going to set the computers to sleep relatively quickly. Probably after the hours of 5:00PM and up until about 7:00AM. I f I click OK and OK again, that creates the plan. The next thing I want to do is create a second plan. Which, instead of setting the Power Saver plan, we will instead set the High Performance plan. Here, I am going to chose to sleep after 240 minutes. That's four hours.' Then go back up here to set the active Power Plan and then adjust the item level targeting so that instead of being from 5:00PM to 7:00PM, I start at seven in the morning and go to five at night. These two plans will now alternate, one during the day and one in night, so the users will not be interrupted by me adjusting their Power Plan.