You're playing a video game and notice it has microstutters, or occasional hitches, or your computer isn't quite so snappy as it was before when you open the Start Menu, or click an app icon to open it.
There could be a number of reasons for this. It is Windows after all, but one place you might want to look at are your power settings. No matter how good your components, they can't work at peak performance without enough electrons flowing through them, so let's crank up the juice.
Modern windows aggressively prioritizes power efficiency
There's nothing wrong with being green, but there are limits
Microsoft (and other tech companies, to be fair) have been on the green energy train for some time now. This is why we got features like energy-aware downloading on the Xbox Series consoles . Since Microsoft controls the operating system most of us use, it means it can set the default power behavior for that computer.
It's not frivolous either. Saving a few watts spread over millions of computers adds up to a lot of power that would otherwise contribute to pollution and climate change. The thing is, when those power-saving measures become aggressive enough to negatively influence your experience, then they've gone too far.
Balanced mode isn't actually "balanced" anymore
The scales are not tipped in your favor
On most Windows computers, there are three power presets: Best Power Efficiency, Balanced, and Best Performance.
They may also be called "Power Saving", "Balanced", and "High Performance", but I'm working with the latest version of Windows 11 as of this writing and that's the naming scheme I see under Settings > System > Power & Battery.
You can also look under Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options, which is where we'll want to go in a minute.
On some computers, the high performance preset may not be visible. It can be restored using a registry hack, but that's not strictly necessary, as you'll soon see. The real point here is that most computers should be on "Balanced" by default, and will only switch to the power-saving mode when on battery power, or if you manually turn it on.
The point of the balanced preset is to give you the performance you need, when you need it, but not necessarily give you more performance than the job calls for. Which is fair. Then, when the computer is idle, it more aggressively uses power saving measures such as "parking" CPU cores, or putting USB devices into sleep mode.
This does sound like the best of both worlds on paper, but in practice I have found that the standard balanced setting on Windows today is tipped a little too far towards the goal of saving power, and that can cause issues.
Power management breaks real-time workloads first
The snap, crackle, and pop of power deficiency
When your CPU parks cores, or drops voltage and clocks, it takes a little bit of time for things to go back to normal again. You can see this as increased system latency. Which you can measure this using a tool like LatencyMon.
In the case of my Windows workstation laptop, issues manifested as stutters and hitches in video games, Bluetooth device drops, and audio pops and crackles. This was more than just a little annoying, it made my computer unusable.
Power-related performance issues can affect any latency-sensitive functions such as USB device communication, audio, wireless and wired networking, and it can push up input latency in games even if your average frame rate seems fine.
The settings that actually made my PC feel fast again
Turn it up to 11
So, how to remedy this? First, I need to mention that if you're using a Windows laptop, I don't recommend you change the default power settings when on battery power. We're aiming to change how your PC manages power when plugged into the wall.
Open the Start Menu, and search for "Edit Power Plan", then select it.
Now, click on "Change advanced power settings."
Here we have a few settings to tweak . Remember that we only want to change these settings under "Plugged in." First, head over to Processor power management > Minimum processor state and change the plugged-in setting from 5% to 10%.
This raises the lowest clock speed the CPU can drop to when idle. In most cases, raising it a little like this prevents the processor from going into ultra low-power modes that increase latency when coming back online. This won't be equally effective on all CPUs, but if it doesn't help, you can always tweak it or return it to default. You may have to keep increasing this number until an app like LatencyMon shows your issue is resolved or your app now runs without issue, but obviously, higher numbers are unsustainable because of the added heat and noise.
Now, go to PCI Express > Link State Power Management and change the plugged in setting to "Off."
This can help latency for both your GPU and SSDs by preventing your PCIe bus from dropping to a low-power state. It won't increase your maximum FPS in games, for example, but it can take the spikes out of a frame graph!
Now, go to USB Settings > USB selective suspend setting and set it to "Disabled" under the plugged-in section.
Finally, go to Wireless Adapter Settings > Power Saving Mode and set the plugged-in setting to "Maximum Performance" so that Windows doesn't put your Wi-Fi to sleep when idle.
Again, changing these settings will increase the power consumption of your PC. It can raise its idle temperature, and idle fan noise level, but the result is a snappier and more reliable PC. So you'll have to decide if that's worth the tradeoff.
