Windows operating system uses power schemes or power plans to control how the system hardware and peripherals consume the system power. For example, power plans can tell the system to turn off the screen after PC has been idle for a few minutes, stop power to USB devices after the system idle of a certain time, put computer into sleep mode and much more.
In a fresh installation of Windows 10, you can find three power plans – Low Power, Balanced and High Performance power plans. But some computer manufacturers install their own power plans that are configured to make the most of the laptop battery. If you want to backup these special power plans so that you can restore them later (for example, after reinstallation of Windows), then here is how you can do it:
- Press hotkey Win+R to open run dialog. Type powercfg.cpl in the Run dialog and press Enter. In the window that opens, find the name of the power plan that you want to backup. In our case, we want to backup Lenovo Eco Power power plan. It could be any power plan that you want to backup.
- Click on Start and type cmd.exe.
- Select Command Prompt from the list of search results, then select on Run as administrator.
- In the command prompt, give the command powercfg /L. Find the GUID string for power plan you want to export. Select this GUID string using mouse and press Enter to copy it. In our case, the GUID turned out to be 64a27fee-5379-4308-8dd2-261ce8ce8b5a.
- Now give the command powercfg /export [FILE] [GUID] where [FILE] is the full pathname of the file for exporting the power plan and [GUID] is the GUID string you noted down in previous step. In our case, the command line becomes powercfg /export D:\code2\lenovo.cfg 64a27fee-5379-4308-8dd2-261ce8ce8b5a
- Whenever you want to restore this power plan, all you have to do is give the command powercfg /import [FILE] where [FILE] is the full pathname of the power plan file.