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Imagine you are a pro gamer and got stuck in a situation on the verge of winning an important game with your partner, and your laptop battery suddenly dies. This may make you quite annoyed that your laptop runs out of battery faster than its features. A laptop that should last for four hours starts showing a red signal within two hours.
There could be many reasons behind this but one of them is its high-performance processors with dedicated graphics cards. It could also be the age of your laptop as batteries are consumables and their capacity and performance eventually decline over time. However, if your laptop is fairly new, it can be any other reasons such as excess heat or background programs and processes.
In this blog, we have shared some best ways and workarounds to improve your battery life on Windows or gaming laptops.
Best Ways to Improve the Battery Life of Your Laptop
Below are some of the best solutions you may apply to extend your Windows laptop battery life.
Set Power Plan To Power Save Mode
Battery saver mode automatically turns on when the battery is less than 20%. However, this works only when you have enabled this option in your laptop’s power settings, which can help save your battery life.
To help you minimize battery usage and extend battery life, you can set your laptop battery in power-saving mode through the following steps.
- Go to the Windows Control Panel section.
- Click on Hardware and Sound button.
- Select Power Options and click on the Power Saver mode.
- If not available, click on the Create a Power Plan button on the left side.
- Choose the Power Saver Mode and click on the next button, and create it.
Use Battery Saver Mode
Turning on your battery-saver mode can disable certain windows features to save power and extend the laptop’s battery life. This can be done through the following mentioned steps.
- Click your Windows or Start Button and type Settings.
- Go to System and click the Battery icon on the left side of Windows.
- If the battery falls, scroll down and check for Turn Battery Saver on Automatically.
- Set Battery charge on (if Battery Saver turns on).
- Choose turn on Lower screen brightness on battery saver, if you want to upgrade the battery life further.
- Adjust Sleep and Display Settings on the window.
Through this method, you may experience some performance issues and low brightness on your laptop. This will automatically happen once your minimum battery reaches a certain level. However, it may significantly increase your windows battery life.
Limit Your Frame Rates
Nowadays gaming laptops usually come with high refresh rate monitors and high-end dedicated mobile GPUs for high frame rates, such as 144Hz or higher. This normally lowers the battery even before completing the games tutorials section.
However, you can save battery power and extend the life by limiting your laptop’s frame rate to a lower number, such as 60FPS. This can extensively decrease power consumption and significantly increase your laptop’s battery life.
- If your laptop has an Nvidia GPU, activate Battery Boost in the GeForce Experience App.
- If you are using AMD GPUs, choose Frame Rate Target Control in Radeon Settings App.
You can set your frame rate to 60fps as a balanced option, but for the maximum battery life with acceptable playability, 30fps is the best option.
Turn on VSYNC
Vsync is a virtual option integrated into a laptop. This makes the GPU wait until the monitor is ready to draw a new frame. Being a frame rate limiter in Windows, it will ensure that the game will never render more frames than your screen.
This not only prevents your laptop screen tearing (two partial frames on-screen at once) but it may also prevent wasteful rendering which generally pushes your GPU and CPU to a limit, leading to extensive power draw from the laptop battery.
Even if you own a high refresh rate monitor, it still has too many frames for battery-based play. You can turn down your laptop screen refresh rate through the following steps.
- Go to Settings and click on System.
- Select Display -> Advanced Display -> Choose a refresh rate.
- Select the least one from the options. Lowering the refresh rate can significantly reduce battery usage while gaming without a power adapter.
Disable Your Wifi
Wifi constantly consumes the battery life on your laptops even though you don’t need it in some games. Turning it on allows it to maintain a connection with the internet as well as keep on searching for available networks to connect to that can drain your battery life. You will surely experience a good battery once you off your Wifi while playing games that don’t require an active internet connection.
- Go to the right-side taskbar and click the Wifi icon.
- Right-click Wifi button and turn it off.
- You can also click on Airplane mode to save the battery.
Lower Volume or Use Headphones
A laptop’s built-in high-fidelity speakers typically consume more power when they are set to high volume. This is due to high voltage and current being required for more sound. And if you are using large external USB stereo speakers, they will consume even more power than the built-in ones.
Therefore, if you enjoy working while playing music in your background or playing games on battery, decreasing the volume or muting your speakers can save your battery life. Alternatively, you can also use a pair of headphones as they consume much less power than laptop or external stereo speakers.
Disable Irrelevant Apps Running on Background
If you are using Windows 10 or 11, you can find a lot of features and applications running in the background. This could ensure to give quality service to their users. But sadly sometimes this may degrade your overall battery life and performance.
As applications running in the background do consume power but running at the same time can sometimes eat a lot of your laptop battery. To solve this problem, you can disable certain apps from your background by following these steps.
- Click the Windows Button and type Settings.
- Go to the Privacy option. Click the Background Apps. You will see a list of apps running on your windows background.
- Turn off the irrelevant applications to prevent them from running in the background. Turning off all the background apps is also available.
- Under Background Apps choose the option Let Apps run in the background. Turn off these apps.
Disable Power Draining Apps
Apart from background apps, there could be some other apps too that might be draining your laptop’s battery life. These apps consume not only more power but also degrade the overall laptop’s performance.
You can simply find and disable these apps to improve your laptop’s battery life. Follow these steps:
- Press the Windows key and click on Settings.
- Click on System and choose the Battery option.
- Right, Click on Apps affecting your battery life.
- A new page will open up showing the apps taking the most usage.
- Click on the particular app and lower its activity.
- Select Reduce Work the App on the Background button if you want to increase the battery life.
Windows Power Troubleshoot
Like Antivirus Checkup, you can also run power troubleshooting on your laptop. This will identify the issues in your power settings that are affecting the overall battery life. It can automatically fix problems such as power sleep settings, brightness, and wireless that might be draining the laptop battery.
- Go to Windows and click Settings Button.
- Click on Update and Security.
- Open the Troubleshoot option.
- Scroll to the right side and click the Power button.
- Now Click Run the Troubleshooter.
The troubleshooter will scan your laptop problems and fix them automatically. While this is not a permanent solution, it will allow you to extend the battery life for some time.
Conclusion
A high-performance laptop generally runs for fewer hours on battery power. But you can find many ways to reduce your battery usage and improve the laptop’s battery life and performance. For instance, you can disable some unwanted apps or close background processes to keep your laptop clean, and minimizes battery usage. You can also follow many other ways shared in this blog to extend your laptop battery life and improve battery performance.
