Increase your Windows Servers 2008 and 2012 performance

I've noticed that a lot of system administrators start searching about solutions to increase their Microsoft windows server 2008 and windows server 2012 performance without noticed that there is a very important decision they can deal with it before starting their searches and applying their solutions. In some cases, this decision may solves your server performance issue without proceeding with anything else.

The decision is to change the default power plan from Balanced to High Performance.

Before starting the changes, let we shortly talk about what power plan means and the power plan types included by default in the windows servers.

A power plan is a collection of hardware and system settings that manages how computers use and conserve power.
By default, windows server 2008 R2 and windows server 2012 R2 include the following three power plans:

1. Balanced: Automatically balances performance with energy consumption on capable hardware
2. Power Saver: Saves energy by reducing your computer’s performance where possible
3. High performance: Improve the server performance but it may uses more energy

We can customize these plans for our systems by changing the available settings, or create new plans that are based on the existing plans.
 
Change the default power plan from Balanced to High Performance by following the below steps:


1. Logon on to the server with a local admin account and go to Start > Control Panel. 
2. Select the view by to Large Icons and click on Power Options, or keep the default view and type the word 'power' in the Search Control Panel box and then click Choose a power plan. 
3. Click on Change settings that are currently unavailable. 
4. Choose the High Performance option, and if this option doesn’t appear, click on Show additional plans then you will see that option
5. Close the current window. 
 
 
After accomplished the above steps, you must keep monitoring the server performance and if you still report an issue with your server performance, start planning for advanced solutions.
 
Hopefully the above changes solve many servers’ performances issue for you as my expectations before losting time and money to deal with hardwares and softwares changes.