How to Unlock Power Plans on Surface Devices
In this tutorial, you will learn about what is Connected Standby, Modern Standby and how to unlock all power plans and advanced settings on Microsoft Surface devices.
Start from Windows 8, Microsoft has introduced a new feature called Connected Standby. With Windows 10, this feature has been expanded to the Modern Standby. With modern standby, your system can be in connected standby or disconnected standby depending on hardware support and software configuration.
SEE ALSO: Double your Surface battery life with our ultimate tips.
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, on your type cover, press + R, and type regedit to open Register Editor. Now you need to go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power
Double click on CsEnabled and change Value data from 1 to 0, and click OK.
You need to 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.
Note After you turn off Connected Standby, instant on/off and OneNote activation by Surface pen while standby will be unavailable. When you press the Power button, your Surface will go into hibernation. However, after you finish creating or customizing all power plans and settings you can still re-enable Connected Standby to restore all those functionalities. And all plans and settings will still remain there even after you enable the Connected Standby.
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.
