Disabling Power-Saving Features in Windows
June 10, 2026
Microsoft has included power-saving features in every OS going all the way back to Windows 95. These early attempts were primarily designed to save battery power by putting parts of your system, such as the screen, to sleep when idle for an extended period of time.
Starting primarily in Windows 98, the OS began introducing additional kernel-level power-saving measures intended to reduce power consumption regardless of whether the system is on battery power or shore power. These features include putting USB ports and network interface cards to sleep under certain conditions which, contrary to popular belief, don't necessarily include a complete lack of activity on those ports.
Starting primarily in Windows 98, the OS began introducing additional kernel-level power-saving measures intended to reduce power consumption regardless of whether the system is on battery power or shore power. These features include putting USB ports and network interface cards to sleep under certain conditions which, contrary to popular belief, don't necessarily include a complete lack of activity on those ports.
There are several methods Microsoft uses to determine whether a port should be put into a deep sleep state, including whether your PC itself has gone to sleep. Of course, as broadcasters we know better than to let that happen to a PC that is handling audio or video.
FOR NICs
D0 Packet Coalescing
While the PC is fully awake (the ACPI "D0" power state), Windows conserves energy using a feature called D0 Packet Coalescing. Instead of constantly waking up the processor for every tiny background broadcast or multicast packet (like your audio signal), the NIC "coalesces" (groups) these packets together. This allows the computer to stay in a lower-power active state for longer periods.
Energy-Efficient Ethernet
Many modern NICs support the IEEE 802.3az standard, which allows the card to enter a low-power "quiet" state during periods of low data traffic. It dynamically scales down power based on how much data is actually flowing through the wire. So it doesn't need to see a complete stoppage of data in order to go to a D1, D2 (intermediate sleep) or perhaps even D3 (deep sleep) state.
Any power state other than D0 (fully awake), as well as power coalescing, can cause lost packets in a network. Since audio and video are transmitted over real-time networks using mostly UDP multicast packets (which won't be re-sent if a packet is dropped by the network) we can't allow any of this behavior in our audio/video computers.
FOR USB PORTS
Inactivity Timers
When no data has been sent or received through a USB port for a specific duration, Windows marks the port as inactive and sends a suspend command to the USB hub.
Device Sleep States: If the connected USB device (like an external hard drive, printer, or mouse) has its own internal power-management capabilities, it can notify Windows that it is no longer in use, prompting the system to power down that specific port. Voxpro does not have this device sleep state, neither do the M4usb Blades or our consoles that include USB connectivity.
WHAT ABOUT THE POTENTIAL SAVINGS THOUGH?
According to the Ethernet Alliance, using energy-efficient Ethernet can save you about 1 watt of continuous power per network interface card.
Doing the math, this translates to roughly a penny to a nickel per day per computer. If you have a lot of computers, and especially servers, you might save quite a bit per year on electricity costs, say, $20/computer/year. But what if an Ethernet card or a USB port going to sleep takes you off the air, even for just a few minutes? Does the missed savings even compare to the lost revenue that can be caused by going off the air, even for just a couple of minutes?
Doing the math, this translates to roughly a penny to a nickel per day per computer. If you have a lot of computers, and especially servers, you might save quite a bit per year on electricity costs, say, $20/computer/year. But what if an Ethernet card or a USB port going to sleep takes you off the air, even for just a few minutes? Does the missed savings even compare to the lost revenue that can be caused by going off the air, even for just a couple of minutes?
DISABLING EVERYTHING GREEN
Wheatstone has documents available on our support site to help you search and destroy all of these settings that are intended to save you money. However, Microsoft has a habit of changing the names of these features and adding new ones on a fairly regular basis. They also have a habit of re-enabling settings that you have disabled, or disabling settings that you have enabled, during Windows updates.
To disable all of the power management, you might need to take numerous steps, including:
To disable all of the power management, you might need to take numerous steps, including:
- Choosing a high-performance power plan
- Looking through the driver settings in Device Manager for every USB and every network device, finding anything called "Power Management," "Energy Saving," "Green," "Eco," "Efficiency," "Sleep" etc., and disabling all of those functions
- Checking your system BIOS for similar power-saving functions that may affect onboard NICs and USB ports, regardless of the OS settings.
- If you are on a domain or otherwise are using Group Policy, check the Group Policy Editor to ensure there is nothing in there that would re-enable these troublesome modes.
- Be sure to check the Wheatstone knowledge base articles on optimizing Windows for VoxPro and optimizing Windows for AoIP drivers.
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