Regarding the power options for my laptop: when you click on the battery icon it gives you the option for choose either balanced setting or one of either power saver or high performance which you can change in the settings. If my laptop is plugged in its always on high performance, and when its not its always on power saver, basically the balanced option is useless to me. Is there a way to show only those two options and not the balanced option?

s18p -On my system, the power configurator screen showed two - Balanced and power saver by default and the 3rd one - the high performance mode was hidden. Once I switched to High Performance, the power saver switched places. There should be a bar after the 2nd one that says "hide additional plans".

Thanks for the quick reply but i think i should have been more clear, i was referring specifically to when you click on the battery icon. when i do so, it gives me two power options. i understand that you can show or hide either the power saver OR high performance, but i actually want to hide the balanced power option so that when i click on the battery icon the only two options that show are power saver and high performance, and NOT the balanced.

s18pHmm.. I don't think you can get there. Since Balanced is the "recommended" spec, it won't move to the bottom. The other way to go about it - using the PowerCFG command at the command prompt doesn't have a "hide" feature. About all you CAN do is possibly delete the scheme. You'll need to run CMD as an administrator, and from there, you can type PowerCFG /? | MORE to get a full list of the commands available along with the proper syntax.I'm not entirely 100% positive it will let you delete that one but you can try it anyhow.

funny thing...but good to know. so i was able to delete the power option with a simple "powercfg -d <guid>" but now not only does it not show the balanced option in the little power options window, but it doesnt show any others either, and i cant make them show up. ill fiddle with it some more and see what i can come up with.

s18p -YIKE! Not good... Can you do a system restore to an earlier point?

i would but i really dont care. i just didnt want to see that damn balanced power option anymore and either way i had to click into 'more power options' to change from power saver to high performance and vice versa. i guess microsoft really wanted that balanced to show up there and it was either their way or the highway. anyway thanks for the help it was very useful.