Manage Energy Management

As promised in my last post, here's how you can manage the Lenovo Energy Management. To get to the Lenovo Energy Management page, look for a stylish battery icon (not the simple battery icon that shows the battery status) on the system tray. If you hover your pointer over the icon, it will show "Energy Management - XXX" where XXX is the current power scheme the S10 is using. Click on the icon and the Energy Management page appears.

Here you can see the icons for the four different power schemes pre-set by Lenovo. The icon you see on the system tray will be one of these and it is the scheme that is currently running. In this screen shot, the scheme used is Low Power and this icon will appear in the system tray. Note that the icon for the power scheme currently employed is enclosed within a square.

(Alternatively, you can access this Energy Management page by selecting the Power management options in the Start menu.)

If you want to change the power scheme to a different one, click on the new scheme and the battery icon will light up. Press the apply button to confirm and the new scheme will take effect while the icon will be enclosed in a square and the corresponding new icon will appear in the system tray.

Double click on any of the icons and you will arrive at the Monitor setting page where you can adjust the brightness, when the backlight will turn off and when the monitor will turn off. This can be set separately for using the battery or using the mains (plugged in).

After setting this page to your heart's content, you can then move on to the next tab which is for the system setting. Here you can set the time for standby, hibernation, turning off hard disk and also the CPU level (frequency). Again you can set separately for either running on battery or plugged in.

You can make whatever changes you want but don't forget to press the Apply button to save you changes. If you have messed up the whole thing, don't worry, just press the Default button and you'll be back where you started.

There are other tabs in the Power Management that you can click and make changes but another important one is the Advanced tab. Here you can enable or disable hibernation just like the one in the Windows Power options screen and you can let the system auto adjust to the power scheme according to the battery power or manually select a particular power scheme.

You can select what mode the system will go into when you close the lid or the reaction when you press the power button or the sleep button. If you have disabled hibernation, it will no longer be an option where it will normally appear here or in the system setting page.

A common user complaint is that the screen goes off after 1 minute or 5 minutes while watching video. This happens when the backlight or the monitor itself goes off after the preset time in the Monitor setting. To stay uninterrupted, set the time to NEVER not only in the Monitor setting but also in the System setting. Otherwise your monitor may be set to NEVER off but when the system goes into standby or hibernation, the monitor will go off anyway. Thus the Monitor setting and the System setting must be in sync to get the desired effect.

In case there's problem in the Energy Management, you can go into the Energy Management folder within the Drivers folder in drive D: to reinstall the programme. On the other hand, if you don't like too many options, you can uninstall the Energy Management programme using the Add/Remove function in the Control Panel and restore control using the Windows Power options.

The choice is yours. So don't fret, go out and enjoy your S10!

(Screen shot to show location of the power management icon in the task bar as requested by one of the readers. Should be there somewhere. Yours may look different depending on the power scheme in use.)

Ronald Kwok
http://cbpirate.com/s/cbp/ronaldkwok