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How to Get Better Laptop Battery Life
Simple tips can help your laptop go longer between charges. Plus, how to choose a battery-life champ.
Need to squeeze a little extra battery life from your laptop? Here are some things you can try.
By Nicholas Deleon
While many laptops can now deliver 15 to 25 hours per charge, there are times when you just want a little more from the model you own. And, honestly, stretching the battery life is not that hard to do. But there’s so much conflicting info online, the process can get confusing.
In some forums, you’re told not to charge a laptop battery beyond 80 percent. In others, people say go right ahead and top it off at 100 percent.
As with many innovations, there are some tips that might have been useful when rechargeable battery technology was first emerging, says Mike Nash, chief customer experience officer at HP. But these days that advice can be outdated or just plain wrong.
“What I like to do,” he says, “is make a combination of garlic, olive oil, and baking soda, and put it on top of the device.”
He’s joking, of course. But here are some tried-and-true tips for extending your laptop’s battery life. All are relatively quick and simple to apply. Below, we also highlight a few laptop models that aced our battery tests.
Take Advantage of Built-In Power Modes
Recent versions of Windows and macOS, including Windows 11 and macOS Sonoma, have low power modes that strip away a lot of the guesswork, limiting the energy your laptop expends as it works. They may slow the device’s performance a bit, but this helps ensure you don’t needlessly burn through battery life.
: Qualcomm CEO Says Laptop Users Won't Need Battery Chargers (Bloomberg)
Here’s how to access the feature:
In Windows 11, go to Start > Settings > System > Power & battery.
In macOS, go to System Settings > Battery > Low Power Mode.
In many cases, you can simply activate one of these low power modes and be on your way. But if you want more granular control of battery life, read on.
Dim the Display
The biggest drain on your laptop’s battery? That’s easy. It’s the screen. The brighter it is, the more battery is consumed. And there’s really no reason to keep it at the highest setting, unless you work under direct sunlight or harsh fluorescent lighting, where that peak brightness helps you see through the glare.
Better yet, lowering the brightness usually just involves tapping one of the function keys at the top of the keyboard. For Apple’s MacBook laptops, for example, the F1 and F2 keys lower and raise the setting, respectively.
“When you first turn the brightness down to, say, 50 percent, you might say, ‘Oh, this isn’t bright enough,’ but about 10 seconds later your eyes adjust and it’s totally fine,” says HP’s Nash. “If you’re just doing email or something on a dimly lit plane, cranking the screen down to 50 percent will have a dramatic impact on how long your battery lasts.”
Turn Off Unused Features
We’re so used to having certain laptop features at the ready, that it’s easy to forget that they’re quietly sapping battery in the background. By turning them off when you don’t need them, you buy yourself more time before the next charge.
Take WiFi and Bluetooth. If you’re on a cross-country flight, hard at work on a PowerPoint presentation or a Microsoft Word document, odds are you don’t need to connect to anything via those technologies. So why not shut them down?
That way your laptop’s built-in radios are not expending energy continuously searching for non-existent signals.
Windows and macOS both allow you to easily turn off WiFi and Bluetooth. On Windows 11, you can just activate the airplane mode (located on the bottom taskbar). On the latest version of macOS, you have to go to the Settings app or the top menu bar.
Shut Down Unnecessary Apps
Back in the day, when laptops had less memory than they have now, running more than a few apps at the same time could result in choppy performance. But that annoyance had a hidden benefit: It reminded you to close the apps you weren’t using.
Today that’s much less of a problem, but, experts say, you may still want to close apps you’re not actively using to maximize your laptop’s battery life.
“Kill all of your programs,” says Vicky Doan-Nguyen, assistant professor of materials science engineering at Ohio State University. The worst offenders may well be apps that constantly communicate with remote servers, such as an email client that’s always fetching new messages.
It’s perfectly okay to have more than one app open at a time—it’s just smart to shut down anything you don’t need. Is YouTube running in the background while you make last-minute tweaks to a PowerPoint deck? That’s not going to help your laptop battery life—or your productivity.
Buy a Laptop Battery-Life Champ
All of these steps can help your laptop run longer between charges, but they won’t turn a computer with an 8-hour battery life into a marathon machine. If you need a model with way more staying power, here are a few that logged great times in our battery tests, designed to evaluate performance in real-world scenarios such as browsing the web and streaming video.
