New Laptop Saga (With a Happy Ending)

[CrystalWizard]

EDIT: OOPS I posted this to wrong thread, but I'll leave it here as it still has some relevancy.

The main issue with current windows for audio is the excessive parking of cores. I recently bought a Dell laptop for audio use only and would get huge dropouts every 30 seconds or so. I did all of the power tweaks I could find online even registry entry hacks to turn off core parking. However, the dropouts kept happening. I checked the performance monitor and Windows was still parking the cores even though I did the registry hack. This led me to the great revelation.......

The difference between Power Modes and Power Plans that I believe began in Windows 10. My Dell laptop only had one power plan option - Balanced. So, I was tweaking settings for this Balanced plan. However, there is a hidden setting for power plans that describes them as Balanced, High Performance, etc. So, if your Power Plan (no matter what it is named) is set to Balanced, Windows 10/11 will use the Power Mode settings and not the Power Plan settings that you are able to adjust. After getting a Power Plan set up that was set as High Performance, it shut the Power Mode off. So, now if I go to Settings/System/Power & Battery under power mode it says that my power mode is turned off and not the "Optimize your device based on power use and performance" with the pull down options of recommended, better performance, or best performance that is there by default.

After getting the Power Mode shut off, my adjustments to shut off core parking (and other power settings) worked and my laptop purrs like a kitten now. Smooth audio with low latency.

Um, and you found that hidden power mode setting where?

[Yort2000]

EDIT: OOPS I posted this to wrong thread, but I'll leave it here as it still has some relevancy.

The main issue with current windows for audio is the excessive parking of cores. I recently bought a Dell laptop for audio use only and would get huge dropouts every 30 seconds or so. I did all of the power tweaks I could find online even registry entry hacks to turn off core parking. However, the dropouts kept happening. I checked the performance monitor and Windows was still parking the cores even though I did the registry hack. This led me to the great revelation.......

The difference between Power Modes and Power Plans that I believe began in Windows 10. My Dell laptop only had one power plan option - Balanced. So, I was tweaking settings for this Balanced plan. However, there is a hidden setting for power plans that describes them as Balanced, High Performance, etc. So, if your Power Plan (no matter what it is named) is set to Balanced, Windows 10/11 will use the Power Mode settings and not the Power Plan settings that you are able to adjust. After getting a Power Plan set up that was set as High Performance, it shut the Power Mode off. So, now if I go to Settings/System/Power & Battery under power mode it says that my power mode is turned off and not the "Optimize your device based on power use and performance" with the pull down options of recommended, better performance, or best performance that is there by default.

After getting the Power Mode shut off, my adjustments to shut off core parking (and other power settings) worked and my laptop purrs like a kitten now. Smooth audio with low latency.

Um, and you found that hidden power mode setting where?

PowerSettingsExplorer!!!! The 2nd line down is the hidden setting to which I am referring (Power Plan Type). If you click on that line then at the bottom of the PowerSettings Explorer, you can change the setting for AC and DC.

forums.guru3d.com/threads/windows-power-plan-settings-explorer-utility.416058/

[CrystalWizard]

Ah, a utility. Thanks.

[BONES]

The difference between Power Modes and Power Plans that I believe began in Windows 10. My Dell laptop only had one power plan option - Balanced.

Mine has four, including one called Turbo, which does the job very well for me, no tweaking required.

Um, and you found that hidden power mode setting where?

It's accessible from Control Panel but not from Settings. One wonders when Microsoft will finally move everything into Settings and retire CP for good. They've been doing it very slowly over more than a decade, surely it can't be that hard, can it?

[soulata]

It's hard, apparently