When a laptop suddenly becomes slow, most people assume it to be a problem with low RAM, old processor or storage. Many times people think of buying a new laptop or upgrading the hardware. But the reality is that battery and power management settings can also be an important reason behind the slow speed of a laptop.
Modern laptops are designed to strike a balance between performance and battery life. Therefore, the system sometimes reduces the processor speed to save power, making the laptop feel sluggish and apps take longer to open.
Most Windows laptops are set to ‘Balanced’ power mode by default. This mode increases or decreases the processor speed according to the task of the system. When you do heavy tasks like video editing, gaming or multitasking, the processor tries to work at its full capacity.
However, it takes time to adjust the speed again and again, making the laptop sometimes slower and less responsive.
If your laptop often feels slow, the first thing to do is check the power mode. Go to Windows Settings, open the ‘Power & Battery’ section and select the ‘Best Performance’ option.
After activating this setting, the system uses the processor more aggressively and accelerates faster when needed. This makes applications open faster and provides a better multitasking experience.
Sometimes the problem isn’t just limited to power settings. When a laptop performs heavy tasks for a long time, its temperature increases. The system automatically reduces its speed to protect the hardware from overheating, a process called thermal throttling.
Thermal throttling reduces the efficiency of the processor and makes the laptop feel much slower than before.
It may sound strange that reducing the processor speed could improve performance, but this technique proves effective in many older laptops.
For this, go to Control Panel, open ‘Power Options’ and go to ‘Advanced Power Settings’. Here, by going to the ‘Processor Power Management’ section, ‘Maximum Processor State’ can be set to 99 percent.
This prevents the processor from overheating and frequent thermal throttling can be avoided. As a result, the laptop becomes more stable and delivers better performance.
Increasing ‘Minimum Processor State’ by about 10 percent may be beneficial. By doing this the processor does not go into complete power-saving mode and immediately starts working at higher speed when required.
This setting can prove to be quite useful for those who do continuous browsing, office work, video calling and multitasking.
Changing power settings can improve laptop speed, but it also has a small downside. The battery may drain faster than before in high-performance mode. So, if you travel frequently or work on battery for long periods of time, use these settings with caution.
Overall, it is not right to blame the hardware every time for the slow speed of the laptop. Sometimes by changing a few power settings you can make your old or sluggish laptop fast and responsive again.
