PSA: Disable Windows' USB Power Saving settings

[Giang, William]

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Hi,

We recently encountered an issue with our Leica SP8 where certain buttons (autofocus, live, capture, start) were greyed out but everything else seemed to be fine.
Leica support was very helpful (thanks, Stephanie!)-the dongle had failed to recover from power-saving mode, so after re-inserting the dongle, everything was fine.

I thought we were fine because we were using the "high performance" power plan, but the default behavior for `USB selective suspend setting` is enabled for that as well.

To ensure this setting is disabled for all users, I created and modified a registry setting as detailed in http://9b5.org/2011/10/windows-disable-usb-power-saving-disableselectivesuspend/.

Instructions are copy and pasted below

I hope this PSA is helpful.

Best,
Will

----------------------
This is handy for disabling the power scheme that may take your USB device offline at the most annoying times e.g. a USB fingerprint reader for Imprivata's workstation sign on going into power-save mode will fail since the device failed to return from power saving mode.
This can also be set via registry settings and eventually by a GPO -
This procedure describes how to modify the following registry setting:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\USB
Entry: DisableSelectiveSuspend
Type: DWORD
Value: 1 disables selective suspend mode. 0 enables selective suspend mode.
Notes

  *   This procedure may reduce the battery life on a portable computer.
  *   This setting affects all USB host controller drivers in the system. If the value of the DisableSelectiveSuspend registry entry is set to 1, selective suspend mode is turned off. Additionally, the Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power check box does not appear on the Power Management tab for the USB root hub.

  1.  Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
  2.  Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services

  1.  On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click Key.
  2.  Type USB for the name of the subkey, and then press ENTER.
  3.  Click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\USB

  1.  On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
  2.  Type DisableSelectiveSuspend for the name of the DWORD, and then press ENTER.
  3.  Right-click DisableSelectiveSuspend, and then click Modify.
  4.  In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
  5.  Exit Registry Editor.


William Giang  |  Research Specialist
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615 Michael Street, Atlanta, GA 30322
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