A situation recently occurred with one of my clients this past week where they couldn’t change the power settings on their pc’s from Power save to any other choice.  No matter what they tried as soon as they hit ok, the setting would go back to power save mode.  There are a couple of reasons why you would not want power save mode.  In there case, the PC’s were actually cash registers (Running Windows XP), and in power save mode, if the pc did not have any activity for a period of 3 minutes (Screenshot below is not from the affected terminals), the pc would go into sleep mode (as XP was turning off, the screen and the hard drive).  This setting is not good for Point of sale software, as the pc going to sleep tends to corrupt the point of sale software. 

          The solution I came up with involved taking a copy of the power management registry entries from a functional machine and then installing the good registry files in the corrupt machine.  The process worked very well and everything ended functional again. 

     Another possible problem one can face with the power management settings is that you have nothing listed.  The same bug that would allow the settings not to save, can just as easily remove all the settings within the power management function. 

     With that all being said, I now share the .reg file I used to restore the settings on all the broken machines.

     Just click on the download button below to start the file download. Keep in mind that the file you will be downloading is a registry file (.reg) so your Windows software or Antivirus software may prompt for a message about it being unsafe to download this type of file.  The file itself is fine, you can ignore the messages (for this file, however, when surfing the internet that is a message you should not normally ignore), download the file to your desktop and then double click the file to enter the info into the registry.

Any questions drop me a line.

(http://cid-8804db538b4de88c NULL.skydrive NULL.live NULL.com/self NULL.aspx/ NULL.Public/Winodws%20Power%20options%20fix/XP%20PowerCfg%20Fix NULL.reg)

 Keep in mind that this file is use at own risk, as neither I nor anyone else at TGM know exactly what your configuration is and this file is being offered as best effort help only.