Set Windows 7 for power saving

The posting "The skinny on power management in Windows 7"by Martin LaMonica (CTNET News Green Tech 12 June 2009), claims that Microsoft has made energy efficiency a key design element of Windows 7. But what settings are enabled by default? Many people do not change the settings in their operating system and the default Windows 7 setting could have a significant effect on Australia's overall energy consumption and carbon emissions for the next decade.

In "Windows 7 Energy Efficiency" Microsoft's engineers discuss energy saving opportunities, including that about 40% of the power in a laptop, and new laptop-like small desktops, is consumed by the screen. But what I couldn't find was a clear statement that the power saving options, including setting the screen to go blank be default, would be set by default in the official release of Windows 7. Reasonable defaults would be for the screen to switch off after five minutes of inactivity, the computer to switch to sleep mode after 60 minutes and to hibernate after 3 hours.