Make desktop icon shortcuts for Vista Power Plans

Have you ever found switching power plans a pain to do when you have to click at the system tray a few times? Well, I kind of wanted a single icon to click say on my quick launch to change power plants etc.

And care of this guide I was able to do just that.

So either check the guide, or read on, on how to do it.

So okay, first open up a command prompt as an admin and type the following:

powercfg -list

This would show the GUID's of the different power plans. There would be three entries there, unless you have RMClock installed or I think NHC (or whatever program that adds a power scheme)

If you're too lazy to bring up the prompt and type it yourself, fine, I'll put it anyway, since I think this is all the same for all machines. So here it is:

As you can see I have a fourth RMClock profile. Well, there.

After this, go back to your desktop and create a shortcut via right click>>New>>Shortcut. In the location bar, type in powercfg -setactive <GUID>, where the GUID will be the long string of letters and numbers of which plan you want to put a shortcut of.

Example:

for High Performance, type in:

powercfg -setactive 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c

After that, type a name into the shortcut. And your done! A bit. Of course the shortcut still has no Icons.

To be simple, you could assign an icon through the shortcut's properties. A good place for the icons would be powercpl.dll in your C:\Windows\System32 folder. Well, I went ahead and edited my own icons through Photoshop (after installing a .ico plugin). I also used a program called GetIcons to extract the .ico files from the dll.

So since this is my first guide of sorts, I'll be including my work here. Note that the icons are good for the classic sized desktop icons, but I have yet to know how to make it not pixelate in normal and large icon sizes.

I'll also be including a snapshot of my desktop with the three icons. Thanks for viewing this guide.

kisetsu17