The Sundarban
Revealed Mar 29, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT
Yadullah Abidi is a Laptop Science graduate from the College of Delhi and holds a postgraduate stage in Journalism from the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. With over a decade of trip in Home windows and Linux programs, programming, PC hardware, cybersecurity, malware analysis, and gaming, he combines deep technical information with strong editorial instincts.
Yadullah at explain writes for MakeUseOf as a Staff Author, overlaying cybersecurity, gaming, and consumer tech. He formerly labored as Associate Editor at Candid.Technology and as News Editor at The Mac Observer, where he reported on everything from raging cyberattacks to the latest in Apple tech.
In addition to his journalism work, Yadullah is a plump-stack developer with trip in JavaScript/TypeScript, Subsequent.js, the MERN stack, Python, C/C++, and AI/ML. Whether he’s analyzing malware, reviewing hardware, or building tools on GitHub, he brings a hands-on, developer’s standpoint to tech journalism.
Home windows’ Power Options panel reveals you a carefully curated list of power plans you can make a selection to control how your laptop performs. However in the event you are feeling your laptop’s performance is now not always up to the hardware you paid for, there’s a accurate chance Home windows may very successfully be throttling it. And that’s because there is one power plan Home windows never reveals you.
Thankfully, the Home windows Terminal is better than it ever has been before, and with a single command, it can list every power plan on your PC. In a few keyboard strokes, you can free up a hidden performance power plan and race your PC the way it was supposed to.
Why Home windows hides its most powerful power plan
The “Ultimate Performance” mode exists, you appropriate won’t ogle it
On a typical Home windows 11 installation, you usually bag a handful of glaring selections: Balanced, Power Saver, and, in the event you are fortunate, Excessive Performance. On laptops, Home windows tends to lean heavily on power saving, so sometimes the greater performance plans are excluded from this list to avoid users obliterating their battery life. It makes sense for battery life, nonetheless in the event you want to push your hardware, especially while you are plugged in while gaming, rendering, or compiling code, you are leaving performance on the table.
Even in the event you attain have the Excessive Performance plan, you may feel that the performance hasn’t really moved. That may very successfully be because Home windows has its dangle idea about how grand power your PC ought to be utilizing. That is why you want to travel beyond the GUI to ogle the power plans Home windows may no longer be exhibiting you in the first place.
One command that unlocks every power plan
Home windows comes with a constructed-in command-line tool called powercfg.exe that exposes everything the GUI may leave out. This tool can list every power scheme registered on the system, including supplier presets and hidden Microsoft plans. To ogle all the plans you have, commence a Home windows Terminal or PowerShell window (preferably with administrator access) and race the following command:
powercfg /list
This does a few issues the Settings app would now not. You can ogle a entire list of available power schemes with a long GUID, a human-readable name, and an asterisk (*) exhibiting which plan is active. You may ogle only the Balanced power plan here, and regardless of the Settings app exhibiting the active power plan is Excessive Performance, your PC may actually appropriate be utilizing the Balanced plan, as shown by powercfg.
In case you don’t ogle a excessive-performance plan, usually called Ultimate Performance, there’s a straightforward repair. Home windows is aware of the GUID of this plan and can enable it in the event you ask successfully. Appropriate race the following command:
powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61
This command tells Home windows to create a unusual power scheme based on the constructed-in Ultimate Performance template, giving it a unusual GUID that will now indicate up in the /list output. This power plan is designed to squeeze every last bit of performance out of your system, decrease latency, and absorb your hardware at plump blast, instead of Home windows stepping in every few minutes to aggressively decrease core clocks and power states.
How I enabled the plan Home windows retains buried
A single command brings it back savor it never left
Once the plan reveals up for your /list output, you can activate it either via the command-line or the Control Panel (beneath the Additional Plans section) after a reboot. To activate it from the command line, use this command, making distinct to replace [GUID] with the actual plan’s GUID:
powercfg /setactive [GUID]
That is now not always all powercfg has to provide, either. It also exposes extra functionality for you to take extra control over your system’s power requirements. In case you want to survey what a plan changes beneath the hood, you can use the /question command to dump every environment of a scheme accomplished with AC and DC values. There’s also a /restoredefaultschemes command that recreates all of Microsoft’s default plans in the event you want to travel back and revert changes.
Is Ultimate Performance actually worth it?
Faster, yes—nonetheless no longer without trade-offs
After switching to Ultimate Performance and rebooting, your system may detached start feeling a bit extra responsive. Display that this is now not always some magic trick to free up extra performance out of your hardware, it appropriate lets it race at plump tilt, and there are facet results to that.
For whatever gain in performance you bag, you may also bag extra heat, which can cause CPU or GPU thermal throttling factors, a greater power draw, and doubtless significantly less battery life. In case you are going to be out and about together with your laptop, maintaining it in Balanced is the most fascinating way to make distinct it would now not bag too scorching or runs down the battery too snappy.
Related
Home windows has certainly become far extra opinionated about power management. The Settings app and OEM control panels only indicate a simplified version of what are otherwise really powerful and in-depth controls.
