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Power Management in Group Policy – What do you do?

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Green is the color of the decade, at least for the moment. What can you do from a Group Policy perspective? More than you might think. What do you do to manage power settings with Group Policy? Answer in the comments.

Before Al Gore warned about the plight of the polar bear, GP admins could configure power management with ADMX settings delivered for Vista. 

With Vista SP1 / Windows Server 2008, Group Policy delivered Group Policy Preferences. This introduced the ability to configure user settings as an admin with the underlying plumbing of policy.

 xpPower

And in Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2, admins can configure power plans for Vista and beyond. So here’s the question: what do you do manage power? Do you configure power settings for XP using Group Policy Preferences? Respond if you do (or don’t!) in the comments.

newPrefVista

Thanks for your feedback,

LiliaG, Group Policy PM

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    I'm having an issue with having the GPO for turning off a monitor.  The GPO applies (checked by running RSOP against the pc), but when I check the Power Options on that pc, the changes are not made - it's still the default time of 20 minutes.  Help!

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Matt - No. You only need W7 RSAT tools to get this to work though at present the Vista CSE's do not support the Power Plan capabilities. We plan to update these within the next couple of months.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    As this thread states, Power Options for Windows XP are only for preferences settings and not for policies: http://help.wugnet.com/windows2/Windows-Server-2003-Group-Policy-power-management-ftopict519250.html The same thread shows a link to third party GPO templates.  I believe that should be native for Windows XP (Policies, not just Preferences). Thanks

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    We just implemented power policy using Preferences on a 1000 computers... Now they all turn off their screens after 20 minutes. This was well recived by the company as it enabled us to enforce their green policy.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    While this is very useful (and I do use GPP to configure Power Options)...it's not half as useful as it would be to configure Microsoft Office from GPP!!! When are we going to see the release of the Application Extensions for Microsoft Office???  PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!!! Lee

  • Anonymous
    June 17, 2009
    Hi......Im always looking at this blog for new stuff and you guys are always posting great things. Congratulations for the great post about Power Management in Group Policy Preferences. I also post new things about Group Policy in my Blog ( Language - Portuguese Brazil ) and Ill just link this post today. Thanks for the great content. Thiago Pereira | Comunidaed WinSec.org

  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2009
    lee, I have asked Microsoft many a time, none have ever got back to me about Application Extensions for Microsoft Office in GPP. I believe there a legal issues behind it. Remember that GPP is technology they brought. Without GPP for office, it is a job half done.

  • Anonymous
    July 05, 2009
    We implemented six power policies via GPO and GPP, three vista, three XP.  Each OS is filtered via WMI and I have "Standby" "KIOSK" and "RDP" for each. Standby uses the least power, no screensaver, monitor off after 10 and pc to standby after 30. RDP uses no screensaver, monitor off after 30. Last is KIOSK, no power savings, but I enforce a scheduled task via GPP that performs a complete shutdown at a certain time coupled with a bios setting via distributed executable file that sets the "turn on" feature at a certain time depending on the KIOSK location.

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2009
    How can we update Windows Server 2008 to see the power options for Windows Vista and Windows 7?  Do we have to upgrade to Serer 2008 R2 in order to receive these preferences?