Create a Shortcut or Hotkey to Switch Power Plans
Have you ever wanted to be able to just hit a hotkey that tells Windows to switch from High Performance down to Power Saver? Sure, you can use the tray icon, but since we like to customize things there’s always another way.
Windows 7 and Vista come with the powercfg command that you can use from the command prompt, and we’ll have to use this tool to figure out the GUID—the internal ID that Windows uses—for the plan itself.
To find the power scheme GUID, simply open up a command prompt and type in the following:
powercfg –list
Creating the Shortcut
Next you’ll need to create a shortcut by right-clicking on the desktop and choosing New \ Shortcut.
powercfg -setactive <SCHEME_GUID>
You can repeat the same thing to create another shortcut for one of the other power plans.
Customize the Shortcut
Now that we have some fancy shortcuts, you can make them look better by tweaking the icon, and then assign a shortcut key. There are a number of really great icons in the following Windows DLL file:
C:\Windows\System32\powercpl.dll
And you can assign a shortcut key to switch power schemes on the fly.
Once you’re all done, you should have two new icons, ready to use.