Modern PC's, notebook's, etc. try to save energy by using a smart power management. For this several hardware manufacturers specified the ACPI standard. The standard defines several power states. For example, if processor load is not needed the processor changes to a power saving (sleep) state automatically and vice versa. Every state change will stop the processor for microseconds. On some systems this time is enough to cause problems during high bandwidth image data transfer.

Note: This feature can only be used when DeviceConfigure is started with elevated user privileges since modifying the C-state configuration requires to change the current power scheme which requires elevated privileges!

See also: More information about ACPI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Configuration_and_Power_Interface

DeviceConfigure allows to disable the power management on the processor level (so-called "C-states"):

Note

The API used to configure the CPU sleep states on Windows did change through the versions of Windows! The following table shows what can be done in which version of Windows:

Windows® Version	Availability
Windows XP or smaller/older	Only C2 and C3 states can be disabled.
Windows Vista - Windows 7	C1, C2 and C3 states can be disabled.
Windows 8 and above	Used Windows® API has been removed! Use BIOS settings, power management features from the Windows control panel or Registry hacks to configure C-state behaviour!

Please be sure you know what you do! To turn off the processor's sleep states will lead to a higher power consumption of your system.

Modifying the sleep states using DeviceConfigure does only affects the current power scheme. For notebooks this will e.g. make a difference depending on whether the notebook is running on battery or not. E.g. if the sleep states have been disabled while running on battery and then the system is connected to an external power supply, the sleep states might be active again. Thus in order to permanently disable the sleep states, this needs to be done for all power schemes that will be used when operating devices.

Start DeviceConfigure.
Go to tab "Settings" and uncheck "CPU Idle States Enabled".

DeviceConfigure - Settings

The sleep states can also be enabled or disabled from the command shell by calling DeviceConfigure like this:

DeviceConfigure.exe set_processor_idle_states=1 quit

or

DeviceConfigure.exe set_processor_idle_states=0 quit

The additional quit will result in the application to terminate after the new value has been applied.

Note: With Windows Vista or newer DeviceConfigure must be started from a command shell with administrator privileges in order to modify the processors sleep states.

To completely disable any GUI display the hidden parameter can be specified as well:

DeviceConfigure.exe set_processor_idle_states=1 hidden quit