How to disable power management for devices on Windows 10
Windows 10 has a neat feature called power management. Power management is for the various hardware components on your computer. Hardware consumes power and Power management allows them to turn off or run in a low power state. The keyboard and mouse are one example of hardware that’s powered down, but hard disks are also powered down when they aren’t in use. It’s a useful feature but if you need to disable power management for whatever reason, you can. Here’s how.
Disable power management for devices
You can disable power management for devices from the Power Options screen. The quickest way to get to it is to open File Explorer and enter the following in the location bar.
Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options
Here, you will see all the power plans that you’ve configured on your system. Power management is disabled on a per-power-plan basis. Click ‘Change plan settings’ for the power plan you want to disable power management on. On the next screen, click ‘Change advanced power settings’.
In the window that opens, you’re going to have to go through several different settings to disable power management for devices. There isn’t a single switch that will do the job. Instead, you can choose on a per-device basis, which device to disable power management for.
The options you see in this window will differ based on the hardware that is installed on your system, and what features it supports. The items you need to go through here are Hard disk, wireless adapter settings, USB selective suspend under USB settings, Platform and thermal framework settings, PCI express, and Processor power management. Check out the settings under these sections and disable anything that limits power.
You should go through all the settings and see if you find anything else for managing power supplied to devices.
We should mention that Windows 10 has power plans that favor better battery and that favor performance. The performance-based plans are power hungry and will likely have many power management options disabled. You can try using it instead of changing the settings for the balanced power plan. You can also create a custom power plan, or you can enable the Ultimate Power Plan on Windows 10.
If some of your devices are still powering down after you’ve disabled all the options under the current power plan, you can check the device’s properties under Device Manager and see if it has a power management option that you can disable.
