We found a laptop with missing Power Options recently, and was asked how do I restore missing power options? Find out from the article below.
Most laptops and desktops for that matter have the typical options of Balanced, Power Save, Or High Performance. Did you know an Ultimate option is now possible?
How do I restore missing power options?
Let us give you some further information about power options. Setting power options has long been considered something you do when owning a laptop.
Choosing either Balanced or Power Save will maximise battery life but it can greatly impact performance.
Consider working with a large data-heavy Excel spreadsheet and suddenly you begin experiencing extreme delays, it is possible it is attributed to the active power option.
Having power save options can reduce the efficiency of the internal CPU which can help you keep working on the battery, but these power options are available for all Windows 10 machines and not just the portable ones.
What power options can I choose from?
Windows ships with pre-defined power mode options. However, custom ones can also be added.
Balanced
A balanced power setting is designed to profile full performance when required such as running a game or CPU intensive task (please don’t rely on auto-switching 100%). When not required the machine will resort to a low-powered state.
Power Save
Power save will reduce the CPU performance and brightness, during our tests we recorded up to a 30% drop in FPS rates.
This ultimately is designed to maximise brightness while allowing the machine to stay on.
High Performance
Maximise screen brightness and allow the CPU performance to increase, typically misunderstood to mean full power but this is not the case.
Battery life will take a big hit on this mode. However, we find it still allows the CPU to reserve power which can affect user performance.
Ultimate Performance
Ultimate is designed to provide excellent performance to higher-end PCs.
The idea is to eliminate any latencies and as such can be taxing on hardware so by default the option is missing from battery-powered machines, you can manually add this but it will impact battery performance.
Am I missing any of the listed options?
Most computers will display Balanced, Powersave and High Performance as seen below:
There can be others such as Dell Recommended or other manufacturers and in my case Parallels as Windows is running in a Virtual Machine.
If you asked how do I restore missing power options, follow the steps below
To do so load up a Command Prompt with Admin credentials by right-clicking the Start Menu and selecting Command Prompt (Admin), or Powershell and then enter the commands below.
Restore Power Saver
powercfg -duplicatescheme a1841308-3541-4fab-bc81-f71556f20b4a
Restore Balanced
powercfg -duplicatescheme 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e
Restore High Performance
powercfg -duplicatescheme 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c
Restore Ultimate Performance
powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61
In the example below we show you restoring/adding Ultimate Performance
Once restored Power Options are now:
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