Power Plan Manager 2.00
Switch Windows Power Plans Automatically

The Power Plan Manager for Windows allows you to automatically switch between Windows power plans based on which applications are active at any given time.

Power Plan Manager supports switching between up to four power plans, allowing you to maximize energy savings during your daily routine use while still getting maximum performance when you need it.

Some Windows applications are “smart”, e.g. a DVD burning application which ensures that your computer will not go to sleep in the middle of burning a DVD. Unfortunately, most applications do not care. This is where Power Plan Manager jumps in to help you.

Power Plan Manager manages a maximum of four power plans, assigned to power levels. The power levels are color coded. You can setup applications in a list and assign them to a power level. The green level is the default, which is used whenever there is no application active which has been setup in the list.

Three more levels, blue, orange and red allow you to customize your computer’s behavior depending on which applications are active. Here is a typical example on how you could setup power plans:

• A default power plan with a display timeout of 10 minutes and a sleep timeout of 30 minutes is assigned to the green level.
• A second power plan with a display timeout of 10 minutes but no sleep timeout is assigned to the blue level.
• A third power plan with no display and no sleep timeout is assigned to the orange level.
• A fourth power plan with no display and no sleep timeout and with a minimum processor speed of 50% is assigned to the red level.

In this example the computer will turn of its display after 10 minutes of inactivity and will go to sleep after 30 minutes if there is no application active which has been setup in Power Plan Manager’s application list.

If “Skype” has been assigned to the blue level, then Power Plan Manager will automatically switch to the power plan assigned to the blue level, which will ensure that the computer will not go to sleep while Skype is running. You will not miss your friend’s call anymore just because you are away from the keyboard and the computer goes to sleep.

If the “Windows Media Center” has been assigned to the orange level, then Power Plan Manager will ensure that the power plan assigned to the orange level is activated when Media Center is running. So you can watch a movie and there will be no screen timeout and no unwanted sleep mode.

And finally, if you assign your favorite game to the red level, there will be no timeouts and maximum processor power is available for your game. And best of all: if you setup that game application to “foreground only” mode, Power Plan Manager will monitor it and switch to the red level only if that game is running in foreground!

Remember: It is completely up to you to define what the power plans will do. Power Plan Manager does not create power plans, it manages the power plans which you have setup in the Windows Power Options.

This example shows Power Plan Manager’s main window panel. You use it to assign applications and power plans to power levels.

During normal operation Power Plan Manager will silently run in the background. An icon in the taskbar’s notification area will show you the current power level and give you access to the main window panel as well as manual override capabilities.

Power Plan Manager has been designed to work with multiple desktop sessions (switching between users) and can be remote controlled by scripts, making it well suited for advanced environments.

Power Plan Manager is distributed as shareware. It supports the English and German languages and comes with a detailed manual in “pdf” format. You can evaluate its full functionality and the benefits it gives you during the 14 day trial period. After the trial period, a license is required to continue using Power Plan Manager.

Our license is a “lifetime” license. Future releases of this product will use the customer’s existing license key. If, for technical reasons, the licensing system will be changed, customers will receive new license keys free of charge.

System Requirements

Lifetime License!