Windows 7 - Don't seem to have any "on battery" settings

Long story.

About a month ago my power supply blew up. Big BANG! and the computer shut down. New power supply and every thing is back up and running . . . or so I thought.

First strange thing was that when I got back up, Windows couldn't find any of my user files. They were there. Everything was supposedly pointing to them but I was starting up with a default profile. Solution? Delete my account, recreate it and then set the pointers to my existing files. Oddly, I still had some tweaking to do but that's not today's issue.

Last night we had a couple of power hits and I realized that Windows wasn't talking to my UPS, an older APC Back-UPS Pro 500 connected to the computer via USB. Yeah, it's old but it works.

So I started poking around in Windows Power Settings and realized that there is nothing in the power settings about what to do on battery power.

Device Manager shows the APC UPS but that's it.

Any thoughts?

Welcome to Seven forums BarnabasSackett.
I have an APC Back UPS too. You'll need to download the Power Chute Personal Edition from the APC site. http://www.apc.com/tools/download/index.cfm

However you need to create an account or login to one to download their stuff. If your UPS is more than 5 years old and you've not replaced the battery, check to see if it is still holding its charge.

New battery, get them at Batteries Plus for about a third of what APC wants.

I had PowerChute Personal Edition but that wasn't helping. Then my computer started turning itself off at strange times. Oddly, never while I was using it. Then it started shutting down during boot but not if I was starting in Safe Mode. I tried System Restore to roll back to a time before the problems started but that didn't help.

Today, I said the heck with it and wiped the hard drive and reinstalled Windows from scratch. The actual re-install is the easy part, the time consuming part is reinstalling all of the applications and utilities and configuring them as you like them.

Anyway, the UPS is recognized now and the battery options show up in power management so it looks like everything is working fine.

I think that I'll take advantage of the System Image feature and shoot an image of my system in case this stuff happens again.

BTW, thanks for answering.

Oh yeah I use Batteries + too....$32 vs. $69. Did you replace your just now then?
On the new install if you are disabling services, as I do, be watchful of what you stop. One may be a dependant of another.

After you get updates and setup the way you want it and all is well, then make your image. No install needed then, you just use software like Macrium Reflect or Acronis True Image to restore the image to a new/same drive.
Get an external HDD and store your image on it.

No, I replaced it about six months ago. I think that I'm on my third or maybe fourth battery for this UPS.

It doesn't give enough run time to continue to do stuff but it does give me enough time to shut the system down.

Good point.

Another good point.

Thanks.