Power Management is a set of configuration options that enable your Windows 2000 Professional computer to manage how and when your computer consumes power. Normally, a computer will be plugged into a constant AC power source, but there are many situations for both desktops and laptops where users will want to manage their power consumption. Power management is configured using the Power Options applet in Control Panel.
Power Management support under Windows 2000 Professional is divided into two separate power management initiatives supported by the PC industry: Advanced Power Management (APM ), and Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI).
Advanced Power Management (APM)
APM is a legacy power management scheme that is supported by older BIOSes and Windows 95. The design goal of APM was to allow the hardware to be shut down or disabled after a period of inactivity and reenabled if actively needed by the user. The detection of inactivity was in most cases incomplete or nonintuitive under APM. For example, if a user were trying to download a large file over the computer's modem, the APM components under the operating system would detect that neither the mouse nor keyboard was being used. It would then shut down the monitor, spin down the disks, or place the entire computer in a low power consumption mode known as
