For a couple of examples and screenshots already in this chapter, I have been talking about this new fancy-pants power plan that I am putting together, without telling you how to find that power plan in the first place. Let's configure our own Power settings by using Group Policy preferences, which we can then roll out to all of the workstations in our organization.

Create a new GPO for your purposes, and link/filter it accordingly. At this point I will assume that you are familiar with that part of the process. Once the GPO is ready to go, right-click on it and Edit... that GPO in order to navigate to the following location:

Computer Configuration | Preferences | Control Panel Settings | Power Options

Here, you want to right-click on Power Options and choose New | Power Plan (At least Windows 7):

As you can see, we chose to create a new power plan that is for Windows 7 or newer clients. In most environments, this covers all of your workstations. If you still have Windows XP hanging around, well, get rid of it. If that's not an option, then you see that alternative power options exist for configuring those clients as well.

Moving back to configuring our Windows 7 power plan, the first thing we are asked to decide is what CRUD Action to take for this preference package. As is most common, I will leave it selected for Update so that these power plan settings get rolled out to the client machines and will overwrite any existing power options that the users may have put into place.

Next, I simply choose which preference settings I want to employ on my workstations. If I expand Display, then expand Turn off display after, I can put timer settings into place. You will see in the following screenshot that the options contained within are underlined in green. Aren't you glad you know what those green lines mean now? I will specify that, while running On battery, my screen should turn off after 10 minutes. When Plugged in, however, I am going to wait 30 minutes before darkening the monitor:

There are many other power options available inside this screen, and you can set as many of them as you would like. For the sake of saving space, since I think you have the idea already, we will leave it at that for the time being. Remember that you can, as with many preference packages, also make use of the Common tab at the top of these settings to utilize one or more of those five special configuration settings that we discussed previously.

Power Plan is one of those options that are available in both Computer and User Configuration settings. If you would like to determine power options at the user level rather than the way we have done it here, the alternative location you should visit is User Configuration | Preferences | Control Panel Settings | Power Options.