Core Parking and Microsoft Windows Computer Power Management

For years, the issue of computer power management has been, at best, an afterthought in Microsoft operating systems. I have been involved with Microsoft Windows for many years. My involvement started in 1986 when I co-authored the first book published on programming for Microsoft Windows. I have spent the last 25 years in and around Microsoft and their operating systems. I have been watching this for many years.

Microsoft Windows Power Management. It is true that Microsoft Windows have timers to power down. And device drivers could support multiple power modes. And yet, only with its most recent releases has Microsoft started making a serious investment in "Green IT" (or "Sustainable IT") and real computer power management. One of those features is called "core parking". Like so many other names of technologies from Microsoft, the name is meaningless to non-techie types. To understand this term, it helps to look at each of the words that make up the term.

Core. The term "core" refers to a CPU (the brains of the computer). A computer needs to have at least one core. Many high-end workstations will be "dual core", with 2 "logical" CPUs in one physical chip. For server systems, there might be even more. The latest version of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 supports 256 cores.

Parking. Aside from what we do with cars, the term "parking" in computers is often encountered in the context of hard drives. To avoid damage to the physical drive surface, the drive head is moved – or "parked" – away from the read/write surface. Disk drive head parking is related to powering down. In the context of a CPU, there is no read/write head to actually park. Instead, "core parking" refers to the powering down of one (or more) of the logical CPUs.

Supported OS Versions. Which versions support core parking? Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 both support it.

Thank You, Microsoft. For many years, when I posed questions about power management at Microsoft, the answer was often "that's a hardware problem." Before these latest releases, the only folks who seemed to understand the central role that software needs to play in power management were the folks in the mobile phone and embedded divisions of Microsoft. Smart, operating-system power management appears to now be something that the operating systems can do. Thank you, Microsoft.