Vaio Power Management clobbers Vaio SE custom power plan

Hello all,

Sometimes I want to be able to leave my system (Vaio SE) idle without having the screen dim/turn off or having the system go to sleep, even when I'm running on battery. It's a hassle to change all those settings back and forth in the default power plan all the time, so I figured that this was exactly the kind of situation that custom power plans were invented for. I go into Windows 7 power management, create a custom plan (let's call it "MyPlan") and apply it, etc., and everything works great.

The trouble is when I put the system to sleep. When it wakes up again, the active power plan is reset to Balanced. MyPlan is still there but de-selected. After killing various Sony processes and services, it appears that the Vaio Power Management service is responsible for this unwanted switching of power plans. However, I don't want to disable the service permanently, since it performs the 60 Hz->40 Hz refresh rate switching, handles optical drive powerdown, and perhaps does other useful things that I'm not aware of.

Does anyone know if there's a way to convince Vaio Power Management not to clobber my choice of power plan?

 

Whatever the problem was, it went away after a reboot, which I probably should have tried in the first place -- I figured stopping and restarting the Vaio Power Management service would be enough, but apparently there is some other magic going on in the system somewhere. In any case, I can now report that Vaio Power Management is no longer clobbering custom power plans.