I recently had problems on my Lenovo Work laptop with the power manager on XP. It seems that everytime I tried to change a power profile on my machine using the power manager, all the options were greyed out, and wouldnt seem to activate. I looked in Control Panel Power Schemes, everything was there as it should be, so it was puzzling…..
I came upon this Lenovo Forum where a similar discussion was happening, and followed the steps. It seems that the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\PowerCfg\PowerPolicies can get screwed up with too many power profiles, etc… So you need to do a little clean house.
What worked for me, was uninstalling power manager and power management driver on the affected account, going to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\PowerCfg\PowerPolicies while in that account, and removing all the #’ed policies there. I then initiated logging onto another account (the local admin user on my box), installing the power manager driver on local account, rebooting, installing power manager on local account, rebooting. I created a registry backup of HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\PowerCfg\PowerPolicies by right clicking and exporting to a .reg file.
I logged into my local admin account, and located the saved registry file, and merged it in. Remember that I previously deleted the #’ed power schemes in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\PowerCfg\PowerPolicies before doing so….
To save anyone having the same headache, I am including the registry file (XP) that you should use after removing the numbered PowerPolicies while logged into your affected account. It was created using Power Management Driver 1.6.4 in XP, and Power Manager 1.99n. (This has not been tested on the newer 5.x XP Power Manager) Here’s the zipped download:
Windows XP: HKEY_CURRENT_USER-Control Panel-PowerCfg-PowerPolicies
If I get a chance, or anyone else does, I’ll upload one for Windows Vista/7, but it *might* be similar…
If you are having problems still, and wish to revert completely back to windows only, remove all the policies in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\PowerCfg\PowerPolicies and then run this command: powercfg /RestoreDefaultPolicies It will at least restore you back to Windows Default Power Policies…
