Who wants to rush to a power outlet to save their laptop battery? It’s not fun, especially if your family is working and studying from home right now, and there may not be convenient outlets near those corners. Fortunately, modern laptops are far more efficient than their predecessors. These days, even cheap desktop-replacement laptops and some gaming powerhouses can last upwards of eight hours on a single charge. Ultraportable laptops typically last 14 hours or more.
Still, the unpleasant truth is that the battery in your PC or Mac laptop won’t last as long as the manufacturer claims unless you pay attention to a few key factors: your power settings, The number of apps, and even the temperature of the room you work in. The good news is that none of these take much effort to sort out once you know which settings to tweak. Let’s take a look at the highest-yielding, least-effort ways to get the most out of your laptop battery.
1. If you are using a computer, please use the Windows performance management tool
The first stop on our battery life improvement journey is a laptop performance management tool. In Windows 10, it’s a slider, accessed from the battery icon in the taskbar. It aims to organize all settings that affect battery life into several easy-to-understand categories.
The company that made your computer can determine exactly what setting the battery slider control is set on. But in general, keep the following guidelines in mind:
- Best Performance Mode is for users who are willing to sacrifice battery runtime for speed and responsiveness. In this mode, Windows doesn’t prevent apps running in the background from using a lot of power.
- “Better performance” (or “recommended”) mode limits resources for apps in the background, but otherwise prioritizes power over efficiency.
- Better Battery mode provides better battery life than the default setting on previous versions of Windows.
- Battery saver is a slider option that only appears when the computer is unplugged, and it reduces display brightness by 30%, prevents Windows updates from downloading, stops the mail app from syncing, and suspends most background apps.
2. If you are using a Mac, use the macOS battery settings
Recent Mac notebooks have extensive battery and power settings that you can control. In macOS Monterey or later, open the System Preferences app, then click Battery.
Make sure “Slightly dim display while on battery power” is checked and “Enable power nap while on battery power” is unchecked. (When Power Nap is enabled and your MacBook is asleep, the machine will wake up from time to time to check for updates. Disabling it will put your MacBook completely to sleep until you choose to wake it up. On recent MacBook Pro notebooks, if you enable “Slightly dim the display when on battery power” adjusts the display brightness to 75% when you unplug the computer from the power source.
Depending on which laptop and macOS version you have, you may see additional options in the Energy Saver preferences pane. These include “Optimize Video Streaming on Battery” and “Optimize Battery Charging” to disable HDR video playback. Some Macs also have an energy mode setting, similar to the Windows performance management tool above. If you see “Energy Mode” in the Battery section of System Preferences, you have the following options:
- Low Power Consumption: Reduce energy consumption to extend battery life.
- Automatic: Have your Mac automatically use the best performance level.
- High Power: Increases power consumption to improve performance during sustained workloads.
3. Simplify your workflow: close apps and use airplane mode
If you spend a lot of time working plugged in, it’s a good habit to tailor your laptop usage in more power-efficient ways, such as sticking to one app at a time and closing everything else when you’re not using it. It’s a bit like turning off the lights when the room is empty. If you’re constantly going back and forth between the kitchen and the pantry, or between Firefox and Microsoft Word, be sure to keep both sets of lights (and apps) on (and on). But if you’re just cooking, or just watching YouTube videos, it’s best to turn it off and turn everything else off.
In addition to closing other programs while single-tasking, consider enabling Airplane Mode in Windows, or turning off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in macOS if you know you’ll be editing a document when you don’t need web access. In addition to reducing distractions, airplane mode also removes a significant source of battery drain: not just the radios themselves, but background apps and processes that constantly use them, such as updaters and push notifications.
4. Close specific apps that consume a lot of battery
Running multiple apps and processes on your system at the same time will drain battery life faster, and you may not be actively using everything that’s currently running on your PC. In Windows, the Settings app is the first step in finding energy-hungry programs.
Type “see which apps are affecting your battery life” in the Windows 10 search bar to get a list of apps that are draining your battery the most. In Windows 11, you can access this list in the Power & Battery settings pane under Battery usage. If you see a seldom-used app using a lot of battery, make sure to close it. Usually, these are apps you leave open in the background and forget about, like Spotify or Adobe Reader.
Next, type “view processes that start automatically when you start Windows” into the search bar, or open the Task Manager application. In the Startup tab, you’ll see every utility that runs as soon as you turn on your computer. Anything named “Download Assistant” or “Helper” is usually safe to disable. For example, unless you frequently open Spotify playlists, tracks, or albums from links in your web browser, you can disable Spotify Web Assistant.
To perform a similar app cleanup in macOS, search for “Users & Groups,” then click the “Login Items” tab, where you’ll find a list of apps you’ve specified to run in the background when you start up your Mac.
5. Adjust graphics and display settings to save power
If you have a powerful graphics processor (discrete GPU) in your laptop, you can ensure that only games or other graphics-intensive applications need to use it, while everything else can be handled by using the more efficient on-chip CPU to get. In Windows 11, go to System > Display > Graphics > Settings, where you can adjust which graphics processor each app uses, or let Windows automatically decide which is best. This option may not be available on all Windows 11 laptops with dedicated GPUs.
To perform a similar assignment on a Mac, open the same Battery preference pane mentioned earlier and make sure the Automatic Graphics Switching option is checked, as shown in the macOS Big Sur screenshot below. You don’t have fine-tuned control over each program as you do in Windows 11, so you have to trust macOS’ judgment when it comes to which app should use which graphics accelerator.
