9 settings I changed on my Windows 11 PC to maximize the battery life

Over the years, Windows PCs have gotten considerably more capable of squeezing a full day of work out of a laptop battery, but there’s still a certain level of anxiety that comes with disconnecting from a fixed power source. That’s especially true if you have an older PC that’s lost some of its battery capacity with age.

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Reducing battery anxiety doesn’t require drugs or meditation. All you need is knowledge about how your PC and Windows work together. The tools you need are all included with your Windows installation. Some are available as part of the Windows Settings app, but the most important one is the Power Settings Command-Line Tool, Powercfg.exe. With the right command-line switches, you can use this tool to gather an impressive amount of information about your PC’s power usage.

This article assumes you’re using a portable PC that meets the Windows 11 hardware compatibility requirements, with a processor that’s capable of entering the Modern Standby state, running a recent Windows 11 release. With those criteria satisfied, all of the following steps should work just fine.

1. Create and save a battery report

Before you do anything else, use the Power Settings tool to generate a detailed report showing information about your PC’s battery usage over time. This information is saved as an HTML document that you can view in any web browser.

Each battery report includes both tables and charts showing recent usage, usage history, battery capacity over time, and battery life estimates. You don’t need deep technical skills to gather useful information from this report.

Start by opening a Command Prompt session. Press Windows key + R to open the Run dialog box, type cmd, and press Enter. Then, in the Command Prompt window, type the following commands, pressing Enter after each one (be sure to include the space between each command and the argument or switch that follows it):

cd %temp%

powercfg /batteryreport

That sequence generates the battery report and saves it in your Temp folder. To open the report immediately from the Command Prompt window, type the full report name, battery-report.html, and press Enter. (To save a few keystrokes, type batt, and then press Tab to autocomplete the full filename.)

Each time you generate a new battery report, it overwrites the previous one. Any information more than a few weeks old gets summarized into aggregate values covering a full week or month. To save the daily details, open File Explorer, navigate to the %Temp% folder, move the battery report file to your Documents folder, and give it a new name.

2. Check your battery’s current capacity

Your laptop battery has a capacity measured in milliwatt hours (mWh). Over time, as you charge and discharge a laptop battery, that capacity degrades. After a couple of years of normal usage, your battery life might decline from an acceptable five or six hours to just two or three. Eventually, the degradation can be so severe that the laptop is essentially unusable unless it’s plugged in.

The Installed Batteries section at the top of the battery report shows the design capacity of each available battery (how much of a charge it could hold when it was brand new), as well as the current full-charge capacity. The Battery Capacity History section shows the change in both values over time.

As you can see from this example, the battery in my Surface Pro 9 has lost nearly 6000 mWh in the 18 months I’ve owned it, or about 12% of its capacity.

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The best way to extend your battery’s life is to avoid storing or using it in high-temperature environments; unlike older battery technologies, you don’t need to worry too much about partial discharge cycles, although it helps to do a full discharge-recharge cycle occasionally (once a month or so). If your laptop offers smart charging capabilities, you should take advantage of that option, especially if you keep it plugged in most of the time.

3. Analyze your observed usage over time

For as long as I can remember, PC manufacturers and independent reviewers have struggled to come up with measurements of battery life that can be used to compare the performance of different devices. Typically, those schemes measure either video playback or some form of cycling through web pages and various apps.

Those measurements are useful in an abstract way, but what’s even more useful is knowing how much of a drain your daily activity places on your laptop battery. And, of course, that measurement varies depending on the apps you’re using, the quality of your network connection, and other variables. That’s why measuring actual observed usage is more important than any synthetic benchmark.

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You’ll find details of battery drains in the battery report, which shows a graph and table covering the last three days, under the Battery Usage heading.

The graphical portion shows time (from left to right) and charge/discharge activity (up for charging, down for discharging). The table below it provides details about each change from active use to Connected Standby while running under battery power.

The real key to interpreting this data is knowing what you were doing in each session. For example, in one such report, I had two Active sessions, each roughly an hour in length, with one session consuming 7% of battery and the other taking about twice as much. Knowing what you were doing in each session helps you see, quite literally at a glance, how battery-intensive each specific activity is.

4. Estimate your average battery life

The Battery Life Estimates section of each battery report delivers exactly what it promises: an estimate of how much total battery life you would get in a session based on your observed activity.

These estimates are generally quite accurate, and they help to see at a glance just how much of your battery is being used in each session based on the work you’re doing. If you compare the values under the ‘At Full Charge’ and ‘At Design Capacity’ headings, you can see how much battery life you’ve lost because your battery has lost capacity.

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Occasionally, I’ve noticed that the battery report can record an anomalous bit of data that is startling to see, as in one session where Windows told me, in all seriousness, that I could expect just over 980,741 hours of laptop use. Needless to say, that estimate turned out to be unreliable and, annoyingly, made the average battery life calculation less than helpful.

5. Identify which apps are affecting your battery life

The battery report isn’t the only useful bit of system information that Windows 11 provides. A separate report allows you to zero in on power usage on an app-by-app basis. To find this listing, go to Settings > System > Power & Battery and then click the arrow to the right of Battery Usage to show a detailed graphical display. Look under the Battery Usage Per App heading to see which apps are having the biggest effect on your energy usage.

Use the drop-down menu at the top of the page to filter the list so that it shows activity over the past six hours, a full 24 hours, or the previous week.

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This list is a really powerful way of identifying apps that are using more than their fair share of your battery. Armed with these details, you can modify your app usage or check for additional power-saving options for individual apps. The Microsoft Edge browser, for example, has an entire section of performance-enhancing settings that can save a significant amount of power if used judiciously. 

6. Use the Windows energy-saving checklist

Windows 11 has an impressive number of options you can adjust to save energy and thus extend the life of your battery. Rather than going through those settings piecemeal, I recommend you go through the built-in Energy Recommendations checklist in Windows 11, which includes direct links to the actual settings, and in some cases even has an Apply button to make a change immediately.

To open this list, go to Settings > System > Power & Battery, and then click the Energy Recommendations heading at the top of the section.

7. Adjust sleep and display settings

If the defaults on the Energy Recommendations list seem too aggressive, feel free to make some adjustments. Instead of putting your system to sleep after three minutes, for example, you can choose five or 10 minutes. Yes, you’ll use a bit more energy, but if you’re more comfortable working with those settings then the trade-off is worth it. Using the options under the Screen and Sleep heading, you can adjust the interval after which Windows turns off the display and puts the system into sleep mode, with different intervals depending on whether the system is connected to a power source or is running on battery.

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The display is one of the most power-hungry pieces of a modern PC, so turning it off as quickly as possible is a great energy-saving move. Likewise, there’s little penalty in aggressively setting sleep thresholds. Modern processors are very efficient at managing sleep states and can resume in literally an instant.

8. Learn the quick Shutdown secrets

Most often, you’ll transition between the Active and Modern Standby power states by closing the laptop’s lid, pressing the power button, or using the Power menu. But there’s another option that can be easier in some situations: the Shutdown command.

You can use this tool from a Command Prompt (Cmd.exe) window, or from the Run dialog box, or even from the Search box. Shutdown has lots of command-line switches, as you can see if you run its built-in help option:

Shutdown /?

But a few of those switches deserve to be on your shortlist. Run shutdown /r to do a full shutdown and restart after a brief grace period. Use shutdown /fw to restart and go to the firmware user interface.

9. Use the Battery Saver option for maximum power savings

Windows 11 includes a Battery Saver option (beginning with version 24H2, this feature is called Energy Saver) that instantly turns off activities that chip away at battery life, such as push notifications and background activity for some apps. Turning on Energy Saver can dramatically increase your battery life and has the bonus of reducing distractions as you work.

By default, Battery Saver is set to turn on automatically when your remaining battery capacity drops below 20%. You can change this setting by going to Settings > System > Power & Battery. Click the down arrow to the right of the Energy Saver heading to expand its options. Don’t forget the Lower Screen Brightness While In Battery Saver option at the bottom of this screen. Dimming the display is one of the most effective ways to save battery life.

To turn on Battery Saver manually without opening Settings, click the battery icon in the notification area and then click the Battery Saver option. You can tell that Battery Saver is on by the leaf that appears over the battery icon. Click that option again to turn Battery Saver off. Battery Saver is automatically turned off when you plug into an external power source.