ParkControl for Windows

Tweak your CPU’s performance with ease

ParkControl is a free system utility software that enables you to easily configure your CPU core parking settings. Developed by Bitsum, this handy program lets you customize your PC’s power plan and how your CPU behaves in certain situations in order to either improve efficiency or save battery life. 

Similar to Process Lasso, ParkControl is used for optimizing your PC’s performance. This is an option you can use if you find that Powercfg.exe is too tricky to set up for configuring your power plan. However, take note that not all systems support CPU core parking in the first place.

What is ParkControl?

To those unfamiliar with the term, CPU core parking—also called “CPU parking” or “core parking”—is a low-power sleep state supported by most modern processors and operating systems. Similar to frequency scaling, it dynamically slows down your CPU cores in order to conserve power when idle. However, some OS use it too often and your PC ends up not performing its best at times.

If you’re interested in customizing this behavior, then you can use a program like ParkControl to enable and disable CPU parking yourself. It’s easy to use as it’s portable and doesn’t require installation—simply run its EXE application to start. It offers real-time monitoring, with a system tray icon displaying your CPU’s status. Plus, you will get power profile change notifications to stay on top of things.

What’s great about this tool is that it doesn’t need a reboot for the changes to take effect. These changes will also persist even if the software isn’t running or even installed on your device. If you want more features and customization options, there’s a premium version of this called ParkControl Pro. It has stuff like a pre-configured power plan and a dynamic boost to help you.

A nice little tool

All in all, ParkControl is a great utility to have if you’re worried about your CPU’s performance. While it will require you to check if your system even supports such a feature, it’s still pretty handy to have if you want to be hands-on with how your PC operates. It’s easy to use and there’s even a paid version available if you want more features at your disposal.