How to Change the Power Settings on Your Computer

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Michael Burton, with michaelburtonfilms.org, located in Salt Lake City, Utah, and we're here talking about, using Microsoft Windows. What I want to talk to you about now is, how to change the power settings on your computer. Let me start out by saying, that Windows XP is a registered trademark of Microsoft, and I am in no way affiliated with Microsoft. There are two main ways to change the power setting in your computer that I'm going to show you right now. The first involves, just simply right clicking on the desktop, scrolling down to the properties menu, this brings up your display properties. If you notice, across the top here, there's a few tabs. We're going to go over to the screen saver tab, this brings up your screen saver window, as currently right now, I have no screen saver, as you can see. But down here, is your monitor power, monitor settings, you see there's a button here called power. Go ahead and left click on the power button, this brings up your power schemes, and your power options. As you you can see right now, under power schemes I have it set to home office or desk, because that's what my computer is, it's from my office. If you hit the drop down button, you'll see that they have a number of different schemes. We have portable laptop, we have presentation, always on, minimal power. You want to set this to basically what you use your computer for, that way the computer can- they're kind of like presets almost, but then you can scroll down here, you can either save it, if you do like me, I come down here and I do some customization where I want the monitor turned off after 20 minutes, and as a matter of fact, I'm going to pull up the drop down menu, scroll down, and turn that to, never, I never want my monitor turned off, I turn my own monitor on and off. It's a pain for me to have to come back, and wiggle the mouse to get the monitor to turn back on, so I just turn on and off the monitor at my own will. I have the, turn off hard disks, to never, I have the systems standby, the system hibernate, to never, never, never, because I'm usually rendering video clips on the computer, or I'm downloading video clips, and if they it goes to standby, or hibernates, or the disk turns off, then that really messes up my video download. So you can customize this however you want, and then go up to save as, and save your own power scheme that way. If you ever need to use another project scheme, then eventually come back to the one you created yourself, or you customized, it'll be real easy for you to come under you drop list here, under power schemes, and choose it that way. Lets close down this window, let me show you one other way to get to your power options. The other way, is to go to the start menu, and to pull up your control menu, which is on the right hand side of the start menu. You see the button over here, under, performance and maintenance, go ahead and click on that. When you pull this up, you notice down here, on the bottom right hand corner, right above system, is the power options, right there, it's pretty self explanatory, brings up the exact same screen we were just on with the power schemes. Again, showing that my monitor is set to 20 minutes, I'm going to go ahead and click that on, never, and the reason why that didn't stay, is because I didn't click apply. So you go down here, to the bottom right hand corner, you click apply when you have your settings, and then you click okay. And that's how you change your power options."