How to Customize Power Settings and Lid Closing in Windows 10?

Your laptop and desktop computer’s performance highly depends on how you use the power settings and battery. In addition, it is a good idea to customize the power settings to avoid unexpected behavior. For example, you press the power button expecting to put your laptop in sleep mode only to find it triggered shutdown action. You have to reboot again and in some cases it may not reboot when running out of battery. In order to avoid this hassle, you can customize the power settings and lid closing action in Windows 10.

Accessing Power Options

First step in customizing the power settings is to access “Power Options” on your computer.

• Use Windows Search or Cortana and type “control panel”.

• Open Control Panel app and change the “View by” option to “Small Icons”. This will help you to find the available items easily.
• Find and click on “Power Options” link.

• This will open the power settings on your laptop or desktop.

Customizing Power Options in Windows

There are three things to customize in Windows using Power Options.

1. Choosing the power plan to decide when to turn off display and turn on sleep mode
2. What to do when you close the lid of your laptop
3. Choose what action is triggered when pressing power and sleep button

In addition, you have few shutdown settings available with under “Power Options” section.

Choosing Power Plan

When you click on the “Power Options” link in Control Panel, it will show you the available system power settings. Depending upon your desktop or laptop manufacturer, you will see balanced and optimized power settings as shown below. The below screenshot is from HP EliteBook model and hence you can see “HP Optimized” power plan which is also the recommended plan for the laptop.

Click on the “Change plan settings” to view the options available under the selected power plan. Here, you can choose the inactive time for turning off the monitor and put the computer to sleep when running on battery and plugged in with power cable.

Creating Custom Power Plan

If you do not want to use the available power plans, Windows allows you to create your custom plan.

• Click on the “Create a power plan” link on the sidebar when you are in “Power Options” section.
• Choose one of the available options and provide a name for your plan.
• Click on the “Next” button.

• Customize the display/sleep time delay for battery and plugged in status to create a custom power plan.

We do not see you need a custom power plan, as this has no additional options compared to default power plans.

Note: You can quickly change the power plan using Windows Mobility Center.

Customizing Lid Closing and Power/Sleep Buttons

As you can see the default power options do not have control over the lid or power/sleep button action. In order to customize these setting, click on the “Change advanced power settings” link when you are editing the power plan. You will see a pop-up window like below with many options. Scroll down and click on “Power buttons and lid” to expand that option.

You will see three options to customize:

• Lid close action – on battery and plugged in
• Power button action – on battery and plugged in
• Sleep button action – on battery and plugged in

The default value for lid closing on battery is sleep. If you want to change this to “do nothing”, click on the value and choose “Do nothing” from the dropdown. Click “Apply” button and save your changes. Henceforth, closing lid will not do anything and all your programs and processes continue to run when on battery as well as when plugged into power source. You have four dropdown options for lid action – sleep, do nothing, hibernate and shut down.

Similarly, you can choose the action for power and sleep buttons on battery and plugged in. You have five dropdown options in these cases – sleep, shut down, hibernate, do nothing and turn off the display.

There are two advantages in using advanced power options pop-up. One is that you can always click on “Restore plan defaults” button to reset all your settings back to factory settings. Other is that you can customize power settings for different items like hard disk, sleep, display, battery, etc. This is very useful like battery settings to setup low/critical battery percentages and enable notifications for those actions. For example, you can set low battery level as 20% and critical battery level as 10% and enable notification for both these action.

Alternate Way from Power Options Page

Instead of using advanced power settings, you have another way to customize lid action and power/sleep buttons. When you are in “Power Options” section in Control Panel, click on the “Choose what the power button do” or “Choose what closing the lid does” link. Both the links will take you to the same system settings page for the current power plan. Click on the dropdown and choose your preferred value similar to previous method. In this careen, you can choose the “On battery” and “Plugged in” values side by side.

Shutdown Settings

If you scroll down a bit, there is a “Shutdown settings” section with few more options. Here, you can turn on fast startup and enable or disable sleep/hibernate/lock options in the power menu. Remember, standard users cannot edit these options and you should be an administrator to modify these settings.

You can press “Win + X” keys to open power menu and check these options under “Shut down or sign out” item.

Windows Power & Sleep Settings

In addition to the above settings from “Power Options” section, there is another way to customize screen/sleep settings in Windows 10 ☺

• Press “Win + I” shortcut keys to open Windows settings app.
• Click on “System” to open system settings section.
• Go to “Power & Sleep” section and setup the idle time delay for screen off and sleep.

Similarly, go to “Battery” section to enable battery notifications and power saver mode.