Acer R7 low CPU utilization

Hi,
I had an issue last night that took me forever to resolve...

I was using Adobe Premiere Pro and everything was REALLY laggy. The interface was very unresponsive, and it took all night to do a project that would normally take about an hour. When I went to encode the final video it estimated 43 days to completion. Under task-manager, my CPU utilization was only around 20% and ram usage was around 60% I canceled and started looking for the problem. After hours of looking, what I finaly found was really strange, and I have no idea how it happened.

Because I was plugged in, I would have never suspected a power management issue.
Under advanced power management, my processor power management settings were compleatly wacked out.

The "when plugged in" option had my maximum and minimum CPU utilization set to 0! (The setting was 0, and 100 on battery).
When I changed the max to 100, the task manager went to reporting 100% CPU usage and my video encoding time dropped all the way down to about 1 hour, and in reality it only took about 30 minutes.

I have no idea how this setting got changed. From my recollection I have not been in the power management settings since I got this laptop. I am curious, on the R7, what the defaults are supposed to be. My "on battery" and "plugged in" settings are the same now (min=0 max=100), but I have a feeling the battery max should be less than 100%...

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Tommy-Acer

The defaults for Processor power management are:

Balanced

Minimum processor state

On battery: 0%

Plugged in: 0%

System cooling policy

On battery: Passive

Plugged in : Active

Maximum processor state

On battery: 100%

Plugged in : 100%

Under High Performance it should change to

0%, 100%, Active, Active, 100%, 100%

If you are doing any intensive processes, like encoding video, you should be on High Performance.

mazen

This means that all cores are working by getting: "If you are doing any intensive processes, like encoding video, you should be on High Performance."

Thank youAcer-Tommy

adessmith

I understand what it SHOULD be on. However, it keeps changing by itself. (it has done this multiple times now) Not the profile, but the settings of the current profile... (it stays on balanced but changes the max processor state to 0)
I keep it on balanced and occasionally I notice performance issues. I go to the advanced properties of my power profile and find that the "maximum processor state" when plugged in is set to 0%. I change it back to 100% and all is well for a few weeks, until I notice it again.

I bounce back and forth between needing max battery power for basic tasks, and needing max performance for things like video editing. It's a pain to have to constantly change the power profile, so I ensured the balanced profile was configured to basically behave like "power saver" when on battery, and "max performance" when plugged in, which suits my usage pattern perfectly.

It works GREAT untill my "max processor state" for "plugged in" changes itself to 0%, at which point the thing starts acting like an old Pentium II.

Any ideas as to what would cause this setting to change by itself?
It doesnt appear that acer has any propriatary software that messes with this, unless I am missing something.

I did find that I had to disable the ezell sensor service because it worked unreliabily. The native windows 8.1 function for screen rotation seems to work perfectly when this service is disabled. Is there possibly an acer power profile service that would be trying to trump the native power management settings which could be disabled as well?

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