dssupport

You can always ring the vendor's technical support if you need help. "PC Insomnia" is a major issue. It happens when you use an idle (time-out) policy for power management. Whenever a user stops typing / moving the mouse an idle timer starts to count down. This timer can be reset by an application to basically say "Stop, I'm doing something important". Most applications do this sometimes - some do it a lot. The effect will be worse with longer time-out periods and in practice, time-outs over perhaps 2 hours will rarely work because the opportunity to be interrupted is so great. This is a common flaw with any power management approach that uses the underlying Windows timer such as basic GP or GPP. The better products implement their own timers to overcome this "insomnia". I would suspect they all work the same basic way. This is a major difference between basic "free" power management and the third-party products. In smaller organisations there may be less pressure in this area but in larger IT estates it is big business making sure that power management is effective as possible AND proved to be as effective as possible. This is why basic GPP/GP etc just don't cut it in these environments.

We would love to discuss printing issues on this forum and possible workarounds. In many cases problems can be solved without purchasing a product. However we have been told by the forum moderators that as a commercial vendor we cannot do this even if we don't (a) recommend our products (b) offer pricing © list any company contact details or (d) any sales material. We believe that this limits discussion as others can comment on our products but we apparently cannot answer questions or offer any views. We are sorry we cannot help more. We hope that you will not censor this post.

The problem is the split policy between machine and user. Every time a new user logs on the problem can be recreated and a roaming user with a "broken" user policy portion can spread an issue to other workstations. A few years ago I encountered a large institution with power management reporting. Over a period of time the policy "broke" on more and more workstations. The issue was traced back to a broken roaming user profile that "broke" every machine it logged onto and every other user that subsequent logged onto those workstation. The effect was basically viral with the symptoms growing rapidly over a few day period. This problem only effects Windows 2000/XP/2003. It cannot happen in later OS. A login script that consistently sets the policy for each user as they login will work BUT you will need to relax (e.g. secedit) the security on the machine portion of the power management policy so that both machine and user keys are updated in synchronisation. If you follow this approach users will be able to change the policy but it will revert on next logon. A less convoluted approach would be to use a tool like PowerMAN to do it for you. Jim

The problem in Windows XP and earlier is that power policies are stored in both the HKLM and HKCU registry branches. This was designed to allow the policy to roam with the user. Unfortunately this doesn't work very well in practice as the two components interact with each other resulting in very hit or miss outcome. Most commercial power management software includes features to clean-up this mess and Microsoft obviously thought better of it because they completely redesigned things to be workstation-only policies in Windows Vista and later. GPPs can work but they are only preferences. They overwrite the logged on users settings at logon. Unless you hide/ban the Control Panel tools users can subsequently change these settings and inconsistencies emerge the next time the user roams to another workstation. In addition GPPs only let you apply the settings that are present in the Control Panel such as sleep and hibernate. You can't configure different policies for different times or combinations of sleep, shut down, logout and wake-up. All of the leading power management products are based upon an agent technology. This means that a process is running in the background to monitor system state and apply policies according the to the rules you intend. This means much more flexible policies can be applied to really work with the intended user behaviour rather than against it. The second differentiator between the leading commercial solutions and Windows alone is most solutions include some kind of anti-insomnia (sometimes called enforcement) feature. This prevents rouge applications from playing havoc with your policy and ensures things run as expected. The purpose of power management is to limit waste (and save cost). Commercial solutions like PowerMAN have to justify themselves against doing nothing or imperfect no-cost approaches. They do this by offering more policy features and usually some kind of reporting. In most cases the cost can be justified by doing the job much better and being able to measure (and prove) that the job was indeed a success. In environments with hundreds or even thousands of workstations the cost savings can be huge. Jim

No it isn't free but it works properly and is professionally supported. Many people come to it after trying EZ-GPO because it works in a similar way and can be managed with Group Policy. There is a upfront comparison on the website (PowerMAN Technical). I'm sorry you've clearly been upset by my previous post. I trust that you don't think this is an advert.

Hi, My name is Dennis and I work for Data Synergy Technical Support in Sheffield. We make IT management software including our very popular PowerMAN software. This is used to provide simple power management configuration and monitoring using group policy. Dennis