XP Logon Power Management

[dwimorberg]

Hi, does anyone have a power management solution to power down the monitor when the Windows Logon screen is waiting for someone to come along and give it something to do?

 

Unfortunately our TFTs are starting to burn in with the logon box and neither screensaver nor power management will get the picture off the screen until after someone's logged onto the PC. This means that sometimes the computers are sitting there for hours at a time with the logon box in centre of the screen!

 

I have Visionsoft PowerOut installed on the server with all the PCs as clients, and also I've set up the Easy GPO Power Management tool for Active Directory which causes IP Message Buffer errors on all the clients. Still no joy, although the PowerOut power scheme is set on all PCs to turn off the screen after 20 minutes.

 

After someone logs on it's even less predictable; sometimes some PCs will shut the monitor down, and their neighbours don't, and the screensavers seem to be ignored even though I've specified the .default registry settings manually.

 

We're running 2003 AD with XP Pro SP3, the main culprits are Dell Optiplex 280 machines, the rest are a diverse bunch of locally built stuff.

 

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated!

Many thanks,

Michael

Edited June 13, 2009 by dwimorberg

[HCC]

I've got a similar problem with XP PCs,

 

I've set a group policy preferences power scheme for XP and I can see it has been applied by looking at the registry (HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\PowerCfg and HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop]). On some machines it works without problem (screensaver, monitor off, hibernate). On the others they always show the logon message box, the screensaver doesn't start and no power management kicks in.

I've compared the registry keys between a PC that works as expected and one that doesn't and both are the same.

I can see the logon message flicker after 5 mins as though it tried to start the screensaver but failed.

 

All PCs are based on the same image, so I'm wondering if it has something to do with not working as expected after a user logs in.

 

Has anyone had the same problem and fixed it?

[nobleguy]

We tried this and with similar problem results. The issue seems to be that XP power management is split between HKU and HKLM. Power management only seems to work if a matching pair of policies are found which causes trouble with roaming user profiles. In the end we've settled on Data Synergy PowerMAN. This lets us push power policies out to each machine and each user. The bit I like most is that we have been able to setup a policy for when nobody is logged on. This has made the biggest difference to our power management.

 

I found Wikipedia to be quite a good reference on the problem. It explains why Power Management works the way it does (or not):

 

Green computing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia