On Windows, app launches have a micro-delay. Even native apps like Settings or Calculator have some delay. Microsoft is trying to fix this with a feature called Low Latency Profile, which temporarily boosts your CPU clock speed the moment you open an app.
If you have the latest update installed (KB5121003), the feature is already available on your PC, just not activated. If you are comfortable with a bit of tweaking, you can enable it by installing ViveTool.
What’s the Low Latency Profile?
A smarter way for Windows to use your CPU when it matters
When you click on an app, your CPU isn’t running at full speed. Modern processors idle at low frequencies to save power and only ramp up once the system detects sustained load. The problem is that an app launch is a burst of heavy work that’s over in a second or two, and by the time the CPU decides to speed up, the work is already done. So the most time-sensitive moment of the interaction runs at the slowest clock speed.
Low Latency Profile tries to fix this delay. Instead of waiting for the CPU to figure out that something important is happening, Windows uses the click itself as the signal. The moment you tap an app icon or open the Start menu, the OS tells the CPU to jump to near-maximum clock speed for roughly one to three seconds. Once the app finishes loading, the CPU drops right back to idle.
This approach is built on a well-known principle called “race to sleep.” Running at higher clocks for a shorter time can use less total energy than running at low clocks for longer, because the CPU has a fixed overhead just from being awake. Finishing the work quickly and letting the chip drop into a deep sleep state can end up being more efficient overall.
How to enable Low Latency Profile on your PC
The update you need and why the feature might still be missing
Low Latency Profile for app launches arrived with the August 2026 security update, KB5121003. You need Build 26200.9168 (25H2) or 26100.9168 (24H2) or newer. You can check yours by typing winver in the Start menu, or through Settings > System > About.
The feature itself is not brand new, as the shell half of this feature, covering the Start menu, Search, and Notification Center, shipped back in June 2026. The August update is what extends the same boost to launching apps. So if you noticed Start opening snappier a few months ago but apps felt unchanged, that was the feature working exactly as far as it went.
Here’s the annoying part: installing the update doesn’t automatically turn the feature on. Microsoft ships changes like this through Controlled Feature Rollout, where the code lands on your machine but stays behind a feature flag that is switched off by default. Microsoft then enables it remotely, in waves, over a period of weeks. There’s no toggle in Settings, so there’s no way to tell whether you have it or not.
If you don’t want to wait, you can flip the flag yourself using ViveTool, a free, open-source utility that talks to the same internal Windows API that Microsoft’s rollout service uses.
Go to the ViveTool GitHub page, download the ZIP file, extract it and copy the folder path. Open Command Prompt as administrator, navigate to the ViveTool folder, and run the following command. Make sure to change FolderPath with the actual folder path that you copied:
cd FolderPathvivetool /enable /id:58989092,58989177,61391826Restart to apply the changes and check if it’s working. To do this, open HWiNFO in sensors-only mode and watch the CPU frequency while launching an app. If the feature is active, you’ll see clocks spike toward maximum the instant you click, then drop back to idle within seconds. Watch the Speed figure in GHz, not the utilization percentage. Utilization barely moves under this feature.
The performance impact
Faster app opens, especially on older and budget hardware
The gain here is in perceived responsiveness, not raw throughput. The delay this removes is the one between your click and the app window appearing. Once an app is open and running, the boost has already expired, and the CPU is back on its normal power policy. Frame rates, render times, and anything measured over seconds or minutes are untouched.
Where the improvement is most noticeable is on older and lower-end hardware, which is a reversal of the usual pattern where optimizations favor newer machines. The wider the gap between a machine’s idle clock and its peak clock, the bigger the difference you’ll feel. ARM-based systems like Snapdragon X laptops are likely to see the biggest boost, because they transition between power states in microseconds rather than the tens to hundreds of microseconds typical of x86 chips.
In my testing, Notepad, Calculator, Edge, LibreOffice, VLC, the Epic Games Store, and even heavier web-wrapper apps all opened visibly sooner. The improvement held across app types regardless of the UI framework underneath, which suggests the trigger sits below the framework layer. That said, if your app launch is bottlenecked by disk reads or a network round trip, that wait is unaffected. Low Latency Profile only helps with the CPU side of things.
The idea isn’t new; Windows is just catching up
The idea behind Low Latency Profile isn’t something Microsoft invented. Linux has done this for years through the schedutil governor, which takes frequency hints directly from the scheduler instead of sampling utilization after the fact. macOS and iOS do the same with interaction-driven quality of service classes.
If you’re not comfortable using something like ViveTool, that’s fair. Microsoft is rolling the feature out broadly, and most machines will pick it up within a few weeks. Microsoft has also been working on Feature Flags, a built-in way to enable upcoming Windows features without third-party tools, though it’s still in the experimental stage. Either way, Low Latency Profile is one of those rare cases where the fix is cheap, correct, and long overdue. The rest of the industry settled on this approach a decade ago.