Introduction The Windows Vista operating system features significant changes to power management infrastructure, functionality, and user experiences. These changes are designed to enable the following key goals for Windows Vista power management: Energy-saving features that are enabled by default. Windows Vista helps extend mobile PC battery life and reduce desktop and workstation power consumption by enabling energy-saving features by default. Deterministic and reliable sleep transitions. Sleep and resume transitions in Windows Vista are responsive and deterministic. Applications, services, and device drivers cannot block in-progress sleep transitions, which gives users additional confidence when they close the lid of a mobile PC or power off a desktop system. System-wide responsiveness to user power policy. Windows Vista users can easily change the overall energy-savings or performance behavior of their system. Windows Vista introduces Away Media and entertainment PC scenarios. Mode, a power management feature that enables the PC to look and feel off while it remains on to record television content or service network requests for media sharing. Realizing each of these power management goals requires changes to the Windows® operating system as well as hosted applications and services. This paper describes the power management changes for Windows Vista and demonstrates power management best practices for applications, including: Handling sleep and resume transitions. Applications must be able to correctly handle sleep and resume transitions. In Windows Vista, applications can no longer block in-progress sleep transitions. Temporarily preventing system idle timeouts. Applications can temporarily prevent the system sleep and display idle timeouts to ensure that background tasks such as device synchronization, hard disk defragmentation, and media recording complete successfully. Responding to common power events. Applications must be able to run on mobile platforms and respond to common system power events, such as power plan personality and system power source (AC/DC) changes, to help extend system battery life. Enabling media and entertainment PC scenarios. Applications might be required to respond to Away Mode transitions and to pause local media playback to help ensure that the PC looks and sounds off while it is in Away Mode. The Windows ecosystem supports many application types and designs. The power management best practices that this paper demonstrates might not address all applications or scenarios. Application developers should use this paper and additional online resources from Microsoft to ensure that their applications correctly handle power management scenarios.
Introduction The Windows Vista operating system features significant changes to power management infrastructure, functionality, and user experiences. These changes are designed to enable the following key goals for Windows Vista power management: Energy-saving features that are enabled by default. Windows Vista helps extend mobile PC battery life and reduce desktop and workstation power consumption by enabling energy-saving features by default. Deterministic and reliable sleep transitions. Sleep and resume transitions in Windows Vista are responsive and deterministic. Applications, services, and device drivers cannot block in-progress sleep transitions, which gives users additional confidence when they close the lid of a mobile PC or power off a desktop system. System-wide responsiveness to user power policy. Windows Vista users can easily change the overall energy-savings or performance behavior of their system. Media and entertainment PC scenarios. Windows Vista introduces Away Mode, a power management feature that enables the PC to look and feel off while it remains on to record television content or service network requests for media sharing. Realizing each of these power management goals requires changes to the Windows® operating system as well as hosted applications and services. This paper describes the power management changes for Windows Vista and demonstrates power management best practices for applications, including: Handling sleep and resume transitions. Applications must be able to correctly handle sleep and resume transitions. In Windows Vista, applications can no longer block in-progress sleep transitions. Temporarily preventing system idle timeouts. Applications can temporarily prevent the system sleep and display idle timeouts to ensure that background tasks such as device synchronization, hard disk defragmentation, and media recording complete successfully. Responding to common power events. Applications must be able to run on mobile platforms and respond to common system power events, such as power plan personality and system power source (AC/DC) changes, to help extend system battery life. Enabling media and entertainment PC scenarios. Applications might be required to respond to Away Mode transitions and to pause local media playback to help ensure that the PC looks and sounds off while it is in Away Mode. The Windows ecosystem supports many application types and designs. The power management best practices that this paper demonstrates might not address all applications or scenarios. Application developers should use this paper and additional online resources from Microsoft to ensure that their applications correctly handle power management scenarios.
PM_apps.docx