Windows’ Power Options panel shows you a carefully curated list of power plans you can select to control how your laptop performs. But if you feel your laptop’s performance isn’t up to the hardware you paid for, there’s a good chance Windows might be throttling it. And that’s because there is one power plan Windows never shows you.
Thankfully, the 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 unlock a hidden performance power plan and run your PC the way it was supposed to.
Why Windows hides its most powerful power plan
The “Ultimate Performance” mode exists, you just won’t see it
On a typical Windows 11 installation, you usually get a handful of obvious choices: Balanced, Power Saver, and, if you’re lucky, High Performance. On laptops, Windows tends to lean heavily on power saving, so sometimes the higher performance plans are excluded from this list to avoid users obliterating their battery life. It makes sense for battery life, but if you want to push your hardware, especially when you’re plugged in while gaming, rendering, or compiling code, you’re leaving performance on the table.
Even if you do have the High Performance plan, you might feel that the performance hasn’t really moved. That might be because Windows has its own idea about how much power your PC should be using. This is why you need to go beyond the GUI to see the power plans Windows might not be showing you in the first place.
One command that unlocks every power plan
Windows comes with a built-in command-line tool called powercfg.exe that exposes everything the GUI might miss. This tool can list every power scheme registered on the system, including vendor presets and hidden Microsoft plans. To see all the plans you have, open a Windows Terminal or PowerShell window (preferably with administrator access) and run the following command:
powercfg /list
This does a few things the Settings app doesn’t. You’ll see a complete list of available power schemes with a long GUID, a human-readable name, and an asterisk (*) showing which plan is active. You might notice only the Balanced power plan here, and despite the Settings app showing the active power plan is High Performance, your PC might actually just be using the Balanced plan, as shown by powercfg.
In case you don’t see a high-performance plan, usually called Ultimate Performance, there’s a simple fix. Windows knows the GUID of this plan and can enable it if you ask nicely. Just run the following command:
powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61
This command tells Windows to create a new power scheme based on the built-in Ultimate Performance template, giving it a new GUID that will now show up in the /list output. This power plan is designed to squeeze every last bit of performance from your system, minimize latency, and keep your hardware at full blast, instead of Windows stepping in every few minutes to aggressively reduce core clocks and power states.
How I enabled the plan Windows keeps buried
A single command brings it back like it never left
Once the plan shows up in your /list output, you can activate it either via the command-line or the Control Panel (under the Additional Plans section) after a reboot. To activate it from the command line, use this command, making sure to replace [GUID] with the actual plan’s GUID:
powercfg /setactive [GUID]
This isn’t all powercfg has to offer, either. It also exposes more functionality for you to take more control over your system’s power requirements. If you want to inspect what a plan changes under the hood, you can use the /query command to dump every setting of a scheme completed with AC and DC values. There’s also a /restoredefaultschemes command that recreates all of Microsoft’s default plans if you want to go back and revert changes.
Is Ultimate Performance actually worth it?
Faster, yes—but not without trade-offs
After switching to Ultimate Performance and rebooting, your system should start feeling a bit more responsive. Note that this isn’t some magic trick to unlock more performance out of your hardware, it just lets it run at full tilt, and there are side effects to that.
For whatever gain in performance you get, you’ll also get more heat, which can cause CPU or GPU thermal throttling issues, a higher power draw, and likely significantly less battery life. If you’re going to be out and about with your laptop, keeping it in Balanced is the best way to ensure it doesn’t get too hot or runs down the battery too quickly.
Windows has certainly become far more opinionated about power management. The Settings app and OEM control panels only show a simplified version of what are otherwise really powerful and in-depth controls. By running one command, it is possible to see every plan registered on your PC, restore missing default, and enable a hidden profile that unlocks the performance your hardware already has.
