Windows power plan is quietly throttling the trading PC

[Amanhasnoname]

Default Balanced plan, minimum processor state at 5 percent, cores allowed to park. When a burst of ticks arrives at the news release, the CPU has to ramp up first. That ramp is short on a desktop, but it is not zero, and on a laptop running on battery or in an efficiency mode it can be noticeably worse. A platform that handles one thread of ticks does not need much power, yet it needs it right now.

Things worth checking on a trading machine:

- Power plan set to High performance, or at least a minimum processor state of 50 percent or more.
- USB selective suspend disabled, plus the "allow the computer to turn off this device" box unticked on the network adapter.
- Windows Update active hours set properly, and updates paused during the sessions that matter. A forced restart in the middle of a trade is a classic.
- Antivirus scans, cloud sync and indexing scheduled outside trading hours.
- Laptops plugged in, always, with the manufacturer's performance profile switched on.

To see what is going on, open Task Manager during a news event and watch the clock speed and which background processes are active. Heat and fan noise will go up a bit; that is the price.

Anyone measured a real difference in tick handling after changing the plan, or is it mostly placebo on modern CPUs?