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Summary

• Best performance uses up the battery fastest, while best power efficiency conserves energy.
• Enable dark mode, adjust screen brightness, and set limits to save power.
• Change your settings to conserve energy by stopping push notifications and reducing background apps.

A dead laptop is useless, and one with a short battery life isn’t much better. Carrying a charger everywhere can be a hassle, especially if you’re just heading to a coffee shop for an hour to get some work done. If your battery drains quickly, you might have no choice but to bring your charger — even for a short outing.

Battery life is one of the most important factors to consider when you’re in the market for a new laptop. If you’re someone who works remotely or has the option to work from home, you’re going to want a laptop that has a long battery life. Even if you commute, being able to work on the train, bus, or ferry is a huge plus — unless your battery dies, cutting your productivity short. This applies to all kinds of laptops — MacBooks emphasize strong battery life and tend to have some of the best on the market. Windows laptops aren’t always known as the best, but some have longer battery lives than others.

If you’re someone with a Windows laptop, you need to do everything you can to extend the battery life. There are steps you can take to help your battery life last as long as possible. A few simple setting tweaks can help extend your laptop’s battery life. Here are some tips to make your Windows laptop last longer on a single charge.

1 Adjust the power mode

Extend your battery life right from the start

This is the best place to start. In Settings, under Power & Battery, you’ll see Power Mode listed right after your current battery percentage. Power Mode is a built-in Windows setting that lets you adjust performance based on your needs. There are three modes to choose from, each offering a different balance between performance and battery life, plus function. The options are:

• Best power efficiency
• Balanced
• Best performance

Best performance will use up your battery the fastest but provide your computer with the most power right away. This will make your colors sharper, the brightness high, and raise the level of each setting to maximize its performance.

Balanced finds a happy medium. This is usually the default setting when you use a new Windows computer and doesn’t push your battery to the limit but provides the average range of your battery’s life settings.

As you can guess, best power efficiency keeps your battery in a mode that will conserve energy. This lowers the brightness of your display and reduces the clock speed of your CPU.

It can also help you lower your carbon footprint.

2 Choose the energy recommendations

Don’t only save the planet — save your battery life

Energy recommendations are new in Windows 11 and let you choose the settings that can help make your computer greener. By clicking into this section, you can adjust multiple settings that impact battery life. The first option, Power Mode, has already been covered, but another key setting is Dark Mode. Dark mode makes your screen’s background dark, which can reduce eye strain by dimming the screen and boosting battery life.

The next option is Set the screen brightness to best energy efficiency. When toggled on, your laptop will automatically adjust brightness based on your surroundings for optimal energy savings. Two more settings — Put my device to sleep after 10 minutes and Turn off my screen after 3 minutes — help conserve power by keeping your computer in sleep mode when not in use which slashes unnecessary energy drain. Finally, Turn off my screen saver is worth toggling on if you want to maximize battery life. Since a screen saver keeps the display active longer, disabling it helps your laptop conserve even more power.

Keeping (screen brightness) around the 30% to 40% marker will be bright enough in most indoor settings to get what you need to get done.

3 Adjust the screen brightness

Handling this manually lets you choose the brightness you want

You can manually change your screen brightness to conserve energy. Obviously, keeping the brightness on the dimmer side will extend battery life. The less power the computer needs to dedicate to lighting the screen, the longer the battery can last. In order to make changes to the screen brightness, you need to:

1. Click on Settings.
2. Click on Display.
3. At the top, you’ll see brightness and color. You can slide the marker for the brightness to the setting you want.

Keeping it around the 30% to 40% marker will be bright enough in most indoor settings to get what you need to get done. You should rarely keep it at 80% or higher — not just for energy, but also because it isn’t good for your eyes.

4 Turn on battery saver and other settings

Use it early and often to extend battery life

Battery saver is found in the Power & battery menu inside settings below the power mode settings. Typically, battery saver is set to turn on by default when battery life is down to 20% — though it’s adjustable. It can come on at different battery level increments, so you can choose the one you want best. Keep in mind that this setting will stop push notifications and reduce the amount of background apps running.

The highest option is the best one for battery life.

There’s also an option to lower display brightness automatically whenever Battery Saver mode is on. If you need to, you can manually adjust the brightness even more in the display settings. At the top of that settings section, you can also adjust the set limits on when the screen will turn off and when the screen saver pops up when you’re using battery power. The default is set to an hour, which can really drain your battery life.

5 Shut down your laptop more

Just putting it to sleep won’t maximize the battery life

Make it easy on yourself and don’t go through the entire process of clicking into the Windows menu, clicking shut off and again confirming you want to shut the computer down. You can do that, but it takes longer. Adjusting the settings, so you can just close your laptop lid and have the computer shut off entirely, is smarter.

The default setting for shutting the laptop lid is to put it in sleep mode, so you need to change the settings in order for it to shut off. You need to go into the Control Panel for this, not the regular Settings menu:

1. Search Control Panel.
2. Open it and click Hardware and Sound.
3. Click Power Options.
4. On the left side, you’ll see a menu with different choices. Click Choose what closing the lid does.
5. It gives you different options for both when you are using battery power and when you are plugged in. Choose Shut down under the When I close the lid under the On battery section.

You can also adjust what happens when you press the power button. Either of these can shut off your computer, which will conserve energy because you aren’t using it at all.