How To Disable Idle Hard Disk Turn-off feature in Vista
Windows Vista has three in-built power schemes by default – High Performance, Power Saver, and Balanced. Although each of these three is designed to suit different power needs, one common thing among them is that the PCs hard disk drives are turned off if it remains idle for a long period. The idea behind this is to save power.
Another related problem to turning off of hard disks is – on accessing the computer from one the idle modes (after hard disks have been turned off), it takes some time before it actually starts. You can often hear loud noises because of the sudden startup of the hard disk’s mechanical part at this point. Only a few minutes later, the hard disk is ready for use. Another problem with this feature is that you might, in some situations, want to keep your hard disk up and running for a long period (perhaps an entire day), and you would not want it to get automatically turned off without your knowing.
To disable the turning-off of your hard disk do the following:
- Go to the Control Panel and select the System and Maintenance option.
- Select Power Options.
- Under “Preferred plans”, click on the Change plan settings tab of any power plan that you might be using.
- Select the Change advanced power settings tab near the end.
- Select the Hard Disk tree and expand it.
- Next, select the Turn off hard disk after tab.
- Click on the Settings tab. Here, you need to set the time (in minutes) after which an idle hard disk gets turned off. In order to do this, go down the drop-down menu and select Never. Or else simply type 0 in the box.
Press OK.
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