How about a thread for the odd question about tech/OS/software… I’ll start.
So in Win11 Settings there are Power options. The problem: I don’t know what they do, and whether they stick as you go off AC power. Are these ‘per power state’ settings? I’m just amazed that there’s zero information in the UI what these actually do.
In the Control Panel I can still find a single power profile “balanced” where I can choose system behavior for when on AC and when on battery. Are those independent? Conflicting?
I mean… I could ask Google, but why not spread my ignorance on TPCR…
According to what MS told one of our engineers last year, the settings in the control panel supersede the settings in the power options for battery powered devices and are sticky through normal reboots/restarts, though they may revert to default settings in the after event of a hard crash especially if it was possibly triggered by a power event such as unexpected loss of power (unexpected battery failure).
In our testing with our custom devices, we find this to be true. However there are APIs in windows that OEMs and others can use to tweak that behavior.
The most prominent one we are aware of is with APS Uninterruptable Power Supplies where if they detect a switchover to the UPS will downshift windows to better battery life, regardless of what was set, assuming you install their software.
Thanks! This kind of info would be really useful to have in the UI somewhere… Hiw about the reverse, if you set Best Performance in the modern settings app, is there a way to look up what that implies for on and off battery power?
If you set it in the power settings, it will make the requisite changes in the control panel normally. but… the aforementioned API’s can screw this up.
We recently saw this with the new X1 carbon where Lenovo’s software has some custom tweaks for battery health and display control.
What happens is that the two settings then get out of sync as to what each claim are the settings, with no real way for the user to know which to believe. We reported this as a bug to Lenovo but haven’t gotten any response yet though several others besides us have reported it and requested a fix.
Yet another instance where MS starts with good intentions, but the OEMS fail them in actual delivery.
1 Like
Hifihedgehog
(Hifihedgehog - Waiting for Surface Pro 10!)
5
This power mode selector that is now buried in the Settings app works identically to the Windows 10 performance power slider that was once more intuitively flipped up by clicking on the battery icon. So just like if you set a power setting while on AC power, it would apply to only AC power and likewise with battery, the same holds true here only that now you have to dig for it. (Thanks, Windows 11!)
What is mildly confusing just as before with Windows 10 is the legacy power plan in control panel also exists and makes people wonder which controls what. This power plan has little impact in modern standby (previously known as connected standby on Windows 8) on the processor power level other than a setting I will describe later.
It has just a single “Balanced” profile to control power and more to tune performance of other system peripherals as well as fine tune your processor even further. There are a few settings within the advanced power settings you can change such as time to turn off the hard drive. There are even settings for minimum and maximum power state for the processor but this does not work quite how you might think.
More confusingly, the Windows 11 power mode/Windows 10 performance power slider actually determines what the true maximum and minimum processor state, or maximum and minimum clock speeds. The maximum and minimum processor state set here then works within that range window, so you can add finer control. So, if, for example, in recommended, your maximum clock speed was 2 GHz and you set the maximum processor state here to 50%, your maximum clock speed would then be 1 GHz. These maximum and minimum power state settings stay the same if you change the power mode/performance power slider, so you might want to adjust them depending on the power mode/performance power slider you are in.
Hifihedgehog
(Hifihedgehog - Waiting for Surface Pro 10!)
7
It just goes to show that even in Microsoft’s pursuit to modernize and simplify, they still cling to some of the relics of the past, many for legacy support reasons to appease sys admins, and make things more confusing in the process for both experts and novices alike. What they should have done if they wanted to do it right in the first place was move all of these settings over to the Settings app in one fell swoop. Instead, you have two places for power settings that will seriously intimidate any user and is a mess to explain. They need to bite the bullet, port everything over, and kill off the legacy control panel.
Definitely! While we wait for that though, MS should at least tell me whether the chosen setting will stay active even when I unplug from AC. As it, it makes this user think that the SLS will stay in Best Performance mode even on battery, which I don’t want. That’s just bad design.
1 Like
Hifihedgehog
(Hifihedgehog - Waiting for Surface Pro 10!)
9
Agreed! Also they should have an option to set the power mode for both AC and battery power without ever having to unplug or plug in the device to then change it for either. I imagine seeing a column divider or a selector to change the power setting under either AC power or battery regardless of being plugged in or not.
OTOH. at least we still have options whereas with anything Apple it is “we know best” with the only things a consumer can do is dim the display, or turn off the radios which implicitly saves power
2 Likes
Hifihedgehog
(Hifihedgehog - Waiting for Surface Pro 10!)
11
True, though I have to admit that Apple’s “trust me, bro” mantra has been consistently hitting a much higher quality mark for battery life and mobile performance year after year. The problem is Microsoft and Apple seem to have agreed and concluded that user control and quality of experience for power and anything else OS related are mutually exclusive which couldn’t be further from the truth. Valve’s Steam Deck does a particularly excellent job of disproving this hypothesis. Users can either just move a slider or toggle between a basic and advanced view and go to town to control their power usage. Also, the open platform still very much allows for a closed store with copy protection and typical walled garden safeguards if you stay within the highly flexible sandboxing environment they’ve given you. Though outside the gaming UI, the desktop UI is typical Linux gobbledygook (sorry, Linux fans!), the Deck’s SteamOS 3 is a prime example of how to make a flexible and good OS.
My annoyance with the power slider in win 10 is that it doesn’t stick. My Raytrektab 8 have to be put in " Best battery life" to achieve the same battery life as the old Atom Bay Trai tablets.
But once I plug in and turn it of, it always turn on as "better performance " the next day. That can cut the battery life down by half if I don’t carefully check the setting.
, I think it differs a bit per laptop, depending on how the oem implemented it. For my acer travelmate laptop I set it to balanced (instead of max performance) on ac power to keep the temperatures in check (which is better for the battery longetivity).
, it should remember the setting (both for the one you select when on ac when on battery), I think what your tablet does might be a bug or bad implementation by the oem.
