Setting Critical Battery Action To “Do Nothing” In Windows 7

Posted by Matthew Hodgkins in Windows May 3rd, 2009 | 4 responses

For some reason, Windows 7 (and Vista) does not allow setting the Critical Battery Action to “Do Nothing”. You may wish to use this if the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) in your laptop is reporting your battery charge level incorrectly. My poor old IBM ThinkPad T30 has this issue. Very annoying. The tool we will be using that comes with Windows 7 and Vista is powercfg.exe.
Here are the steps:

  • Activate the power scheme you want to modify.
  • Open an elevated command console (Press The Windows Key, type ‘cmd’ in Start Menu, Press “Ctrl+Shift+Enter” and click ‘Continue’).
  • Execute: powercfg -setdcvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_BATTERY BATACTIONCRIT 0
  • Your current power scheme will show “Battery-> Critical Battery Action -> On Battery : Do Nothing”, even though the option is not available in the drop down box.

Now you can let your battery run dry properly!



4 Responses to “Setting Critical Battery Action To “Do Nothing” In Windows 7”

  1. Twitted by matthodge says:
    May 3, 2009 at 10:46 pm

    [...] This post was Twitted by matthodge – Real-url.org [...]

  2. Argus says:
    December 18, 2010 at 6:38 am

    If you still want Windows 7 to perform an action (like hibernate), but want to have it performed at e.g. 1% battery capacity left, use the command ‘powercfg -setdcvalueindex scheme_current sub_battery batlevelcrit 1′. This way, you can still have the savety function acitvated but can use the full battery capacity.

  3. Matthew Hodgkins says:
    December 18, 2010 at 6:45 am

    @Argus – Thanks, thats a great tip :)

  4. Blake says:
    January 6, 2011 at 2:39 pm

    Great tip! I’ve tried both and both work well. Now I can drain my battery to reset it’s processors memory.