Random switches in power plans - Vista

[Flame Of Liberty]

It's driving me crazy, no matter if I set HP balanced power plan or Power saver, about once every hour Vista will change it to High performance, then it goes through a cycle 3 times: High performance to HP balanced, high performance to balanced...

I've updated all drivers, tried the powercfg reset schemes command, set HP balanced as preferred plan in registry keys and...nothing.

Any ideas what may fix it?

PS I should add the problem happens both when it's on battery and when it's plugged in.

[Rathji]

This is a pretty hacked solution but you could just change all your power plans to have the same settings so it didn't matter which one it was on.

[Flame Of Liberty]

I thought balanced/power saver also throttles CPU power so it doesn't overheat - my HP550 overheats like crazy on high perfomance, but it's OK on balanced/power saver.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by Flame Of Liberty

I thought balanced/power saver also throttles CPU power so it doesn't overheat - my HP550 overheats like crazy on high perfomance, but it's OK on balanced/power saver.

I am not running a Vista Box right now but I think is is very similar to Windows 7.

For your specific problem go to your Power Options --> Change Plan Settings --> Change Advanced Power Settings --> Process power management --> System Cooling Policy

Each has 2 options, passive or active. One turns the fan on before throttling the CPU and other slows the CPU before turning on the fan. I don't know which you should be using, but the options are there.

Every other setting can be handled the same way.

[llama64]

My sister in-law had a HP netbook with Vista installed. Can't remember the specific issue but one of the power settings caused it to use 100% cpu all the time (leading to a battery life of 10 minutes).

Resetting the defaults and selecting the max performance fixed the issue without needing a bios update. Changing any of the settings brought the issue back. HP is awesome like that...

But really the best fix for any issue with Vista is "Upgrade to Windows 7". Obnoxious, I know, but true.

[Flame Of Liberty]

I got it cheap so I'm not complaining too much but it's annoying.

What I did is I ran a clean boot with only antivirus and some Intel thingo as the only 2 non-microsoft processes (services)...so far so good so I guess some third party program was causing this.

Thanks for the suggestions.