Powershell: Change/Set Power plans in Windows 7/Windows 2008 R2

Are you looking for a way to change power plan on local or remote computer? You are at the right place. The script discussed in this article will help you in changing the power plans in PowerShell way. MS built-in tool(powercfg.exe) is available that can also help you to do this job. But I am not using that tool in my script by building a wrapper around it. I am simply relying on WMI class to change the power plan. I recommend WMI way because using executables inside script is not a good practice and it should be our last resort when it is not possible through WMI or dotnet class or some API.

The Win32_Powerplan WMI class will return list of power plans available in the computer. This list includes built-in power plans like”Power Saver”, “Balanced” and “high performance” plus any custom power plans that user has created. Each returned power plan a again  a object which will have a method called Activate() to activate the current power plan. This power plan object also contains a proper called IsActive which will be set to $true if is the active power plan that system is using currently.

The code follows…

Set-PowerPlan.ps1

[cmdletbinding()]                        

param (
[parameter(ValueFromPipeline=$true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)]
[string[]]$ComputerName = $env:computername,                        

[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]
[parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
[ValidateSet("Power Saver", "Balanced", "High Performance")]
[string]$PowerPlan                        

)                        

begin{}                        

Process {
foreach ($Computer in $ComputerName) {
 if(Test-Connection -ComputerName $Computer -Count 1 -ea 0) {
  Write-Verbose "$Computer is online"
  $PreviousPowerPlan = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Powerplan -Namespace root\CIMV2\Power -ComputerName $Computer | ? {$_.IsActive -eq $true}
  $CurrentPowerPlan  = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Powerplan -Namespace root\CIMV2\Power -ComputerName $Computer | ? {$_.ElementName -eq $PowerPlan}
  $CurrentPowerPlan.Activate()
  $OutputObj  = New-Object -Type PSObject
  $OutputObj | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name ComputerName -Value $Computer.ToUpper()
  $OutputObj | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name PreviousPlan -Value $PreviousPowerPlan.ElementName
  $OutputObj | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name CurrentPlan -Value $CurrentPowerPlan.ElementName
  $OutputObj
 } else {
  write-Verbose "$Computer is offline"
 }
}            

}                        

end {}

Save the above code into a file called “Set-PowerPlan.ps1” and it is ready for usage. You can use -ComputerName parameter if you want to run against a computer. If this parameter is not specified, it runs on local computer.

Go through the below examples for usage instructions and let me know if you have any questions.

Hope this helps…