How to Improve Computer Battery Life

Published May 12th, 2021, by Jonah Cohen

All laptop owners know how it feels when their laptop is about to die. While there isn’t too much you can do to get a few additional hours once the laptop is almost dead, you can still improve the overall battery life by taking proactive steps. Most Macbooks and Chromebooks are capable of lasting at least 10 hours, which is more than enough time for most people. If you need to get some more time out of your computer, I would recommend turning your brightness down to around 50% brightness. This will save a fair amount of battery life because the human perception of light isn’t linear, so half brightness is more like one third power. There is also the basic trick of turning on airplane mode, but airplane mode and lower brightness are nothing when compared to what I can do on Windows.

Computers are getting more powerful, and Windows uses the most battery out of all the operation systems. With these improvements also comes more power usage which results in less battery life. This is a problem, but it can be fixed. There is a feature built into Windows so anyone with a Windows computer can use this. First you navigate to: “Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Power Options > Edit Plan Settings”. Then you can find settings that allow you to control all the main power usage features. For this trick, we will be going to the CPU power management tool. From there, change the “maximum processor state” to around 50%. If you have a higher powered laptop, like something made for gaming or video editing, I would turn it down to around 35% to 25%. If you want to have more flexibility, change 2 of the power plans that Windows offers. Change the battery saver to use around 35% CPU and the normal plan to use 50% CPU. This way, you have a choice over what performance you get.

Windows also has multiple power modes. The options are battery saver, better battery, better performance, and best performance. You would think battery saver always gets you more battery life, but better battery is a better option if you are doing any intensive task because battery saver limits the power of the CPU. This is fine most of the time, except if you need more performance, because then the CPU needs to work about 3 times as hard to do double the work.

Unfortunately, there is no way to do something similar on Chromebooks. Then again, it isn’t very necessary on those devices.