Changing the USB polling rate

This post was written 2 years 11 months 2 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

As standard, Windows will poll USB devices once every 1ms. However, this can cause the issue of laptops unable to enter the C3 processor power-saving state. By increasing the USB polling interval from 1ms to 5ms the processor can enter a C3 power-saving state during its inactivity.

There are also suggestions that decreasing the polling rate will also save energy generally. I’m not sure.

But, anyway, until I hear that all of this is some kind of urban myth, I’m willing to give it a try.

Here’s a couple of scripts (save them with .reg extensions and run them as required) that I rattled off to activate the “idle” (5ms) and also to return to “normal” (1ms)…

Activate Idle Polling Interval…

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\
{36FC9E60-C465-11CF-8056-444553540000}\0000]
"IdleEnable"=dword:00000001

Deactivate Idle Polling Interval…

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\
{36FC9E60-C465-11CF-8056-444553540000}\0000]
"IdleEnable"=-

Or download them from here.