How to squeeze more battery life out of your Windows laptop
A set of Windows 11 setting changes can meaningfully extend a laptop's battery runtime, with screen brightness and power plan adjustments offering the biggest gains.
Watching a laptop battery drain unexpectedly is a common frustration, but a handful of Windows 11 setting changes can help stretch out the time before a charger becomes necessary. Most mainstream Windows laptops rely on the power-hungry x86 architecture rather than more efficient ARM chips, and ongoing performance overhead in Windows 11 doesn't help matters.
Brightness and power plans
The single most effective step is lowering screen brightness, done quickly via Win + A and dragging the brightness slider down. Beyond that, users can fine-tune behavior through Settings > System > Power & battery, which offers separate power modes for plugged-in and battery use, adjustable screen and sleep timeouts, and an Energy Saver mode that curbs background activity, dims the screen and disables certain visual effects.
For more advanced control, the classic Control Panel's Power Options menu allows adjustment of minimum and maximum processor state, effectively underclocking the CPU to save power. Turning off transparency and animation effects under Accessibility > Visual Effects, or selecting "Adjust for best performance" in the Windows performance settings, can also reduce battery drain — an effect most noticeable on budget laptops.
Background apps and processes
The other major drain comes from background activity. Checking the taskbar's smaller icons and overflow panel for unneeded running apps, closing unused browser tabs, and enabling features like Memory Saver in Chrome or Sleeping Tabs in Edge all help. Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc) lets users identify resource-heavy processes and disable unnecessary startup programs, further reducing the load on the battery.
