How to open advanced settings of a power plan directly in Windows 8.1

By default, Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7 and Vista come with three power plans: High Performance, Balanced, and Power Saver. These plans are designed to quickly let you switch a group of hardware and system power settings (like display, sleep, etc). These power settings affect how long your battery lasts and how much power your PC consumes. It is possible to customize these power plan settings but it requires too many clicks to get there. If you change these settings often, you can use a special command to directly open them.

Press Win + R keys together on your keyboard to open the Run dialog and and type or copy-paste the following into the Run dialog:

control.exe powercfg.cpl,,3

Press Enter. Advanced settings for Power plan will open directly. This saves you a number of clicks or keystrokes and there's no need to open the basic power options because you can access the advanced settings directly.

You can also type the above command into the Start Menu search box (or the Start screen) and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to directly open it as administrator. This saves you an additional click on "Change settings that are currently unavailable".

That's it. You may want to pin a shortcut to this command to your Start Menu or Start screen for the quick access to these useful options.