I’ve been using Vista on and off again for the past 18 months, and only recently have I really begun to dive into this whole Vista craze. Or lack of a craze. Either way, it’s beginning to become a pain to find drivers for XP on brand new systems (unless it’s a Dell or HP system).

Well, one thing I do like about Vista is how it handles the throttling of the CPUs. Microsoft really opened up all the options for power savings – which is probably why I end up with an extra hour of battery life when using Vista over XP. Ubuntu is still better, but that’s getting off topic.

I created my own power plan. Everything was peachy. When on battery I underclocked my system to 800MHz and .800 core volts. That’s the lowest it could go, and since it’s dual core it’s pretty close to a 1.6GHz machine. And when plugged in, I put it up to 1400MHz, but it rarely ever even popped up there. Why underclock a 2.2GHz machine? I’m not a fan of heat.

But randomly the power settings would go away. The max processor would move from my 1% to 100%. It usually happened after updating the system, but that wasn’t always a factor.

Long story short, it started to peeve me that the computer would revert back to it’s original settings. I wanted it to run as slow and cool as possible. Lucky for me (and maybe you) I finally found a command to edit the power settings. No more clicking into 803838038 different menus to change it.

You can find it Here. It’s called Power3.bat, and it doesn’t harm your computer in any way. You can even edit it if you’d like. I’ve done all the hard work.

In fact, here’s the code:
powercfg -setacvalueindex SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMIN 10
powercfg -setacvalueindex SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMAX 50
powercfg -setdcvalueindex SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMIN 1
powercfg -setdcvalueindex SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMAX 25
powercfg -S SCHEME_BALANCED
pause