Power Settings on Windows 7 using Group Policy

Today me and a collegue had a disccussion on an issue with the power settings beeing applied to a windows 7 Sp1 machine. To start from the begining.

We are working with a customer that has some options that they want implmenten and as a part of that serveral setting in the current power plan are to be modified. So to make these changes we created a Group Policy with setting from Group Policy Preferences.

The policy was working fine and then a new request came in, can we set the options for hybrid sleep to ON. Well ok no problem. Change made and checking on the computers. The value was still off.

After some poking around, looking at diffrent setting in the power plan everything else except the hybrid sleep function was set correctly. There are no other GPOs taking effect and canceling the GPP settings. After a bit of looking around we found a nice KB describing the problem!

So the problem is that the index value for on off is switched between GPP and the Power Setting is reversed. Think of it this way; in the power plan ON is the value 1 and OFF is the value 0 but in the GPP ON is the value 0 and OFF the value 1.

To get around the problem install the hotfix found here https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2514376/

Why Microsoft hasn’t made this a public Windows Update fix is beyond me, but hopefully this will help you out with this specific issue.

Configuration Manager – Custom Steps

Update 2018-08-21
I have seen issues where the SMSTSPostAction step is not executed as expected. If this happends make sure your SMSTSPostAction set step is the last one in the sequence (yes, the very very last)

When doing deployments with SCCM there are a couple of nice to have settings that I always put in and I thought I would share them here.

First off this in it self is nothing new but just a place to collect them in one place.

Lets get started. Create a new group at the top of your Task Sequence, this is not needed but it helps keep the Task Sequence clean and when you create a new one you can just copy the group and get all settings transfer to your new Task Sequence.

In that group create three Task Sequnce variables with the following settings.

Variable: SMSTSDownloadRetryCount
Value: 5
Explanation: To decrease deployment time in SCCM checks and retry values where changed. This can cause issues with timeouts and application deployments. This increases the retry count from 2 to 5.

Variable: SMSTSDownloadRetryDelay
Value: 15
Explanation: To decrease deployment time in SCCM checks and retry values where changed. This can cause issues with timeouts and application deployments. This increases the retry delay to allow NIC more time to initialize before failing.

Variable: SMSTSPostAction
Value: Shutdown.exe /r /t 15
Explanation: The SMSTSPostAction will launch whatever command you type at the end of the Task Sequence but not inside of the Task Sequence. So in this setting a reboot will be done. This is to make sure the client will do a clean reboot and include all GPOs and other settings applied (since GPO is suspended while running Configuration Manager Task Sequences).

The end result should be something like this

Happy deploying!