How to Increase Your Laptop's Battery Life

If you only do one thing, do this. The biggest power hog in your laptop is, by far, the screen. The brighter it is, the more power it consumes. Unless you’re working under direct sunlight, you probably don’t need it at its highest setting.

Lowering the brightness is as simple as tapping a function key at the top of your keyboard and is the single most effective way to immediately extend your battery life.

“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 Mike Nash, former chief customer experience officer at HP. “If you’re just doing email or something on a dimly lit plane, cranking the screen down will have a dramatic impact on how long your battery lasts.”

Next, activate your operating system’s built-in low-power mode. This setting fine-tunes a dozen things at once, such as reducing background activity and throttling processor speed, to maximize efficiency.

In Windows 11: Go to Start > Settings > System > Power & battery. Here, you can select "Best power efficiency" from the power mode dropdown.

In macOS: Go to System Settings > Battery and select Low Power Mode. You can choose to enable it "Always," "Only on Battery," or "Only on Power Adapter."

Activating this mode is the easiest way to implement a broad range of power-saving measures without any guesswork.

Have you ever noticed your laptop warming up or heard the fans unexpectedly kick into high gear? That’s often a sign of a rogue application or an abundance of browser tabs consuming power in the background. The impact of closing a single power-hungry app can be massive.

First, identify the culprit.

In Windows 11: Go to Settings > System > Power & battery > Battery usage. This will show you a list of apps and their power consumption.

In macOS: Open the Activity Monitor app (which is located in your Utilities folder; you can also find it using Spotlight search) and click the Energy tab for a real-time look at what’s using the most power.

Once you’ve found the offender, close it. Be ruthless: If you’re not using it, shut it down. The worst culprits are often apps that constantly sync data or browsers with dozens of open tabs. Each tab can be completing unwanted tasks, quietly draining your battery.

While not as power-hungry as the screen or CPU, the various radios and lights in your laptop still sip power. When you need to conserve every drop, turning them off adds up.

Take WiFi and Bluetooth. If you’re offline working on a presentation, your laptop’s radios are still expending energy searching for signals. The same goes for your keyboard backlight: If you’re in a well-lit room, turn it off.

In Windows, simply activate Airplane Mode from the taskbar to disable all radios. On macOS, you can toggle WiFi and Bluetooth off from the Control Center. The keyboard backlight can usually be turned down or off using the function keys.

All of these tips can help your laptop run longer, but they can’t turn a computer with a 6-hour battery into a marathon machine. If you truly need all-day (and all-night) power, your best bet is to start with a model built to power along.

The following models all have at least 18 hours of battery life, according to our battery-life web test, which measures how long the battery lasts while cycling through a series of online pages. The exercise is designed to simulate everyday use. The models are arranged in descending order by number of hours per charge, with the current top-of-the-line model, the Lenovo T14s, lasting an astonishing 33 hours!