1E Product Manager, Mark Blackburn sent this over. He's been hard at work trying to figure out just why users don't seem to love making the best of the Power Management that is possible in Windows.. 

One of the great things about having such a large installed base for NightWatchman is the great information we can glean from looking at some of our customer’s data. Most of our customers perform a pilot of some sort before enabling power management so that they can quantify the savings that they’re making.

I’ve been examining the data from these pilot periods which show how end-users are configuring power management on their PCs before it is changed by the IT department, and it’s thrown up some interesting statistics.

Windows XP ships out of the box with the sleep timer disabled. Only 9% of desktop users actually changed this setting and enabled a sleep timeout.

Windows Vista ships out of the box with power management enabled. The default power scheme (Balanced) sets the PC to go to sleep after 1 hour, yet over 55% of Vista users had turned off sleep completely.

These facts together show that generally end users don’t care about energy saving on their PCs and would much rather the PC was available when they wanted to use it rather than having to wait for it to come back to life once it’s gone to sleep.

Organizations should take heed of this – there is no point in unnecessarily annoying your end users by setting power scheme sleep timeouts. We’ve already seen how ineffective they are at reliably putting PCs to sleep overnight and at weekends (see “Why Power Schemes are not enough”) – only providing about 20% of the potential savings possible.

Turning off power scheme sleep timeouts entirely and setting a nightly scheduled intelligent power-down using NightWatchman results in much greater energy savings (with rates of 87% of PCs in a low power state overnight and at weekends), and since NightWatchman uses its own methods to determine when users have gone home and then manages the transition to a low power state, this means that your end users are not annoyed by their PC going to sleep during the day.

The end result is happier end users  because their PCs are available when they need them, and happier shareholders because of the money and CO₂ emissions you’re saving.