How to Unlock Power Plans on Surface Devices

1What is Modern Standby?

This modern standby allows your PC instant on/instant off just like you expect to have with your phones. Just like the phone, even in the standby mode, it still remained up-to-date when a Wi-Fi or a suitable network is available.

There are three advantages of using Modern Standby:

• Instant On/Off: your Windows PC and tablet devices can instantly power on and off just like the way your smartphones do.
• Background activity while the system is “off”: allows your PC or tablets devices perform the background tasks from Windows Store apps while the system is “off”.
• Simplified wake story: unlike traditional device wake, with modern standby system waking just require a hardware interrupt.

For more information, you can check Modern Standby at Microsoft MSDN.

2Power Plans on Surface Devices

Every Microsoft Surface devices shipped with a predefined power plan called Balanced with a very few advanced configurations as below:

The limited power configuration in Advanced Settings because of Connected Standby feature that enabled by default on every Surface devices. Those advanced settings are hidden and intelligently managed by Surface. However, if you want to unlock those advanced options, you can do that by following the instruction below:

3How to Unlock Power Plans on Surface Devices

In order to unlock all available power plans and advanced settings, you need to disable connected standby via Registry Editor. To turn off connected standby:

1. On your type cover, press + R
2. Type regedit to open Register Editor.
3. Now you need to go to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power“
4. Double click on “CsEnabled”
5. Change Value data from “1″ to “0″
6. Click OK.
   
7. Restart your computer to apply these changes to your system.

After restarting your computer, now you can access all power plans options including Power saver, Balanced, and High performance.

With connected standby disabled, you also can access the full options of advanced settings of each power plan you selected.

After finish changing, click OK to accept all changes.

To turn on Connected Standby you just go to Registry Editor again change Value data of CsEnabled to 1 and restart your computer. Finally, all modern standby features will back on and your plans and settings will also keep in your system.