Windows 10 Getting 'Ultimate Performance' Scheme to Boost Speed, Preview Build Reveals

Microsoft has released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17101 "Redstone 4" (RS4) for Fast ring users, and Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17604 "Redstone 5" (RS5) build for Skip Ahead users. Insider Preview Build 17101 is specifically designed to upgrade the experience on workstations running Windows 10 Pro by offering a new power scheme called 'Ultimate Performance'. The new power scheme is claimed to offer an "absolute maximum performance" and boosts raw speed to levels that are far ahead of what you can obtain from the existing High-Performance scheme. The latest Windows Insider Preview builds for testers also include some emoji design updates to align with the standard emoji characters.

Among other changes, the major change that the new Windows 10 Insider Preview builds is certainly the Ultimate Performance scheme that is initially exclusive to workstations. This new power scheme is selectable either by an OEM on new systems or can be enabled by end users. If you want to manually experience the latest change on your Windows 10 Pro machine, you need to switch to the Ultimate Performance scheme by going to Hardware and Sound > Power Options, or by simply running "Powercfg.cpl" after pressing Win+R key combination. The new scheme is touted to eliminate micro-latencies that are linked with the default power management techniques. However, it is worth noting here that since the new scheme reduces micro-latencies, it may adversely affect your hardware and make it more power hungry than what it was on the default balanced plan.

Microsoft has noted in a blog post that presently the Ultimate Performance power scheme is not available on battery-powered systems, including notebooks and tablets. Nevertheless, the Redmond company is set to tune and evaluate the power plan settings on a continuous basis.

In addition to the new power scheme, the new Windows 10 testing builds enhance the UWP File System Access by giving more controls to you to decide which UWP apps can access your full file system. There is a new Settings page for File System Access that you can access by going to Settings > Privacy to turn file system access on or off globally or select which apps should use file system access.

For emoji lovers, the newest Windows 10 Redstone builds include emoji search support to a list of locales. You can leverage this new change to search your favourite emojis in any of the more than 150 locales added to search support, including English (Great Britain), French (France), German (Germany), and Spanish (Spain), among others. There are some emoji design updates that Microsoft says are based on user feedback "and to improve consistency." Samsung also took a similar step recently for its Android Oreo-running devices.

The new Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17101 (RS4) is available for Windows Insiders in the Fast ring, while the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17604 aka RS5 is specific to Windows Insiders who have opted into the Skip Ahead ring. Both new builds have several bugs and issues that you need to face by your own to test what's new by the Windows maker. That said, Microsoft is planning to roll out the RS4 build to mainstream users sometime around April 2018 and the RS5 build in October 2018.