VP11: Towards Stability: Power Profiles?

Grazie wrote on 1/26/2012, 12:28 AM
OK, last night I realised that Win7 has this option for conserving power. Must be for laptop power management = saving.

On my PC this has been left operating by me. Don't ask!! Now I've changed it to ALWAYS ON, should I be seeing better stability? I was hammering Vegas, to get the same suspension of service I'd got prior, but this time Vegas felt more stable. Is that possible?

Way, way back I did this to my Dell Schlaptop and had gotten stability, I think that was VV5 or 6? Could this be the same for Win7 and Vegas now?

Are there any other "performance/stability" tweaks I could go for?

TIA

G

Comments

farss wrote on 1/26/2012, 4:17 AM
"OK, last night I realised that Win7 has this option for conserving power"

I just checked it out, theres's a few not just on/off.

"Must be for laptop power management = saving."

Not just for laptops, could save some money with desktops as well e.g. spinning the disk(s) down when nothings been happening for a while.

"Vegas felt more stable. Is that possible?"

Inclined to think not, depends on what specifically you're talking about.
With Win7 and the right hardware you can configure things so some of the cores are powered down to save energy and heat when the CPU load is low, I suppose there's some potential for that to upset something but it shouldn't.

One thing I have had an issue with, on one mobo you can set it up to shutdown some of the CPU power supply "phases" to improve efficiency. Having that enabled seemed to make everything a bit wobbly.

Bob.
NicolSD wrote on 1/26/2012, 8:04 AM
The only advantage is that your computer will never be interrupted if you walk away during a render. Otherwise, it should not change anything involving Vegas.
johnmeyer wrote on 1/26/2012, 9:09 AM
Those settings change the way in which the CPU is slowed down when your computer is idle. Always On is generally a very poor choice for a desktop, unless you don't care about wasting electricity. This setting provides zero change in stability, and no increase in performance compared to Home/Office Desk (the XP default for most OEM configurations -- Windows 7 has probably needlessly and pointlessly changed that name).

The actual results from changing these settings depends on how your OEM configured their version of Windows. They can change these preset profiles (and so can you!!) using PowerCFG.exe. It is a command-line utility built into Windows.

If you want to see the current speed of your CPU, you can right-click on "My Computer" and select properties. You will then see the nominal speed of your CPU and, if you have one of the CPU-throttling schemes enabled, you will see a second figure showing the actual CPU speed at that moment. I just temporarily changed my power scheme to Portable/Laptop, and this is what the screen looks like:



As you can see, my CPU normally runs at 3.2 GHz (stock speed), but at the moment it is running at 1.57 GHz. This slower speed reduces power consumption which increases battery life for a laptop, and saves you electricity costs on your desktop (and "saves the planet," if you think in those terms).

Here's one of several million links if you Google "Windows power schemes:"

Power Schemes