How to Change Processor Power State When Using Battery in Windows 10

Processor Power State is a feature under Power Options that determines the percentage of CPU to use in different battery states. There are two settings, namely Maximum processor state and Minimum Processor State. So if you need to choose between longer battery life over performance, then you can lower processor usage.

What is Processor Power State?

Performance States or also called P-state is a combination of processor frequency, volume and several other things. This allows Windows 10 to adapt to performance requirements or when there is a need. It says that when you change the Maximum processor state percentage, say 50% then it doesn't mean the processor will run at 50% clock speed. What windows is doing here is choosing to subtract one of the factors it uses to calculate P-States. So it's possible that if you drop 50%, then it will only happen after 30%.

Change Processor Power State Using PowerCFG

Now that you know about P-State and Power State, here is how you can quickly change them via the powercfg command line in Windows 10. This can be done in Command Prompt or Power Shell with Admin rights.

• Press Win + R key, then type cmd and press Ctrl + Shift + Enter to open a command prompt with admin rights. If you want to use PowerShell, then press Win + X keys and select Windows PowerShell (Admin) from the list.

• In the command prompt or PowerShell window, enter the command below and press Enter.

powercfg /list

• Running the above command will list all the power plans on your PC. In PCr I have three power plans, namely Balanced (SCHEME_BALANCED), Power saver (SCHEME_MIN) and High performance (SCHEME_MAX).

• Next, run the following command.

The first is to change the percentage of Processor Power State in the balanced plan while power is connected.

powercfg -setacvalueindex SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMIN X

The second is when using the battery.

powercfg -setdcvalueindex SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMIN X

Change SCHEME_BALANCED with SCHEME_MIN or SCHEME_MAX according to your needs and replace X with a number between 0 to 100.

Added Maximum and Minimum Power State

If you don't see the power state, you can add or remove it using this command.

• Maximum Power State

powercfg -attributes SUB_PROCESSOR bc5038f7-23e0-4960-96da-33abaf5935ec -ATTRIB_HIDE

powercfg -attributes SUB_PROCESSOR bc5038f7-23e0-4960-96da-33abaf5935ec +ATTRIB_HIDE

• Minimum Power State

powercfg -attributes SUB_PROCESSOR 893dee8e-2bef-41e0-89c6-b55d0929964c -ATTRIB_HIDE

powercfg -attributes SUB_PROCESSOR 893dee8e-2bef-41e0-89c6-b55d0929964c +ATTRIB_HIDE

You can make changes even while the laptop is still plugged in and it makes sense to do so while you're on battery.

Here's a tutorial this time, hopefully useful for you. Don't forget to leave your comments below to share your experience in following this tutorial. Thank you.