In terms of autonomy, there are never miracles in laptops, and many times we have to settle for mediocre times due to great wear and tear due to time or very powerful hardware. But we can always try as much as possible to improve the autonomy of the laptop as much as possible, we may be surprised!
There are plenty of tips and tricks to get the most autonomy by cutting back on resources and knowing the system well. Here are a few of the procedures that we can test for improvements.
Index of contents
- Check the current status of the battery and its charge cycles
- Calibrate the battery at least once a year
- Set the energy profile to maximum
- The less brightness and lights, the better
- Dark mode, ideal for OLED panels and Tablets
- Avoid using peripherals with RGB
- Delete background apps and shared services
- Do undervolting (the key)
- Adjust fan profile
- Disable the dedicated graphics card
- Limit the screen refresh rate
- Conclusions
Check the current status of the battery and its charge cycles
Before getting down to work, it is advisable to do a previous step, which is to know the status of our battery . By this we mean knowing its maximum capacity, its current load capacity and the cycles that we have already consumed.
In this way we can know what percentage of wear it has , and put our feet on the ground in terms of autonomy aspirations. We all know that any battery wears out over time, losing capacity and worsening its consumption due to charging cycles.
Windows 10 has a command- based function that allows us to see great information about the battery. But only those that are based on lithium and are not too old. In any case, we will find out while we do the procedure.
First of all, we must open the Windows Power Shell command terminal not necessarily with administrator permissions. We can do it by right clicking on start and choosing Power Shell.
The command that we must use will be the following:
powercfg / batteryreport
Now the report report will be stored in the user folder or system32 in case the command has been executed in Administrator mode. We can access it simply by copying and pasting the path that the command terminal shows:
C: \ Users \ <user> \ battery-report.html
If our PC is compatible, the report will show a lot of useful information. The two most important parameters will be Full Charge Capacity and Cycle Count . The first shows us the maximum capacity of the current battery, which in the example we see that it has lost 4,360 mWh in 78 charge cycles . If we continue the report, we will see how capacity has been lost with the consumption of the cycles.
Calibrate the battery at least once a year
We have seen before that improving the autonomy of the laptop will be more complicated the more use its battery has, because over time it loses capacity. Performing a battery calibration can sometimes cause us to regain some of the lost capacity or cause Windows to correctly detect the capacity of the battery.
The procedure will be very simple:
- Charge the laptop battery to the maximum, its 100%
- Next, we must use the equipment until it is 100% downloaded. We have to make sure that we can’t even start the equipment.
- We let the equipment rest for 1 or 2 hours so that the battery cools down to the maximum
- When this happens, we will recharge the battery to 100%
- We can start and use the equipment again
After this, we recommend making a new report with powercfg / batteryreport , it could be the case that you have recovered the lost capacity due to Windows having completely rescanned the battery charge cycle.
There are programs capable of analyzing in detail the duration and consumption of the battery, and it would also be advisable to use some of them to obtain more accurate data on how and why our battery is used depending on which programs we use. Some of them will be BatteryMon, BatteryCare or BatteryBar.
Calibration is a very stressful process for the battery, so it should only be done once a year. In normal use, we should charge the battery when it falls below 50 or 40%, and load it up to 90%. Anything that touches the extremes of 0% and 100% is not good for your life.
Set the energy profile to maximum
One of the most important sections of this tutorial will be to adjust the energy profile parameters to improve the autonomy of the laptop. Windows manages the consumption and performance of a PC with the help of profiles , in which a percentage of use and performance of each hardware element is established . There are profiles of maximum performance, balanced, savings and even other personalized ones that the manufacturer himself introduces.
Taking a few minutes to get to know this in depth will be beneficial for any user. We will access the power profiles simply by right-clicking on the battery icon and choosing Power Options .
We will have an option to Create your own energy plan . After setting a name and the basic parameters of screen shutdown and suspension, we will have a new profile in the system.
Next, we will access it by clicking on Change plan settings and then on Change advanced power settings. Once inside, there will be quite a few parameters that we can modify to our liking to save battery life. We must focus on the ” with battery ” options that are active when the equipment works only with its battery.
- Hard disk: it will be important when we have mechanical disks (HDD) that consume more energy, being able to turn them off after 10 min of inactivity. In SSDs they do not make much sense, as they will only consume power if they are used.
- Wireless adapter: choosing a maximum economy profile will mean that the power of the coverage and the bandwidth will be limited.
- Sleep or Hibernation: Hibernation saves more power than Sleep, although the wake-up process will be slower.
- Ports: Windows can also disable USB ports if they are not in use, thus saving some Watts of standby consumption.
- Integrated / dedicated graphics: this action will be very interesting because it allows limiting the performance of the graphics card on the computer. We can even disable dedicated graphics and pull only integrated graphics that consume much less power.
- Processor: we can do the same with the processor, although a more effective solution than this will be to undervolting.
- Screen: from here we will not be able to limit the maximum brightness of the screen, oddly enough.
We will have an extra configuration panel if we click on the battery icon in the taskbar . A bar will appear with which we can go from a maximum performance to a maximum saving profile in addition to what has already been seen in the energy profile.
The less brightness and lights, the better
This will be essential to improve the autonomy of the laptop , since the screen is one of the elements that consume the most energy due to the powerful backlighting that the LCD panels carry. But also the resolution (number of pixels) and the inches of the panel will harm the autonomy, although these cannot be controlled in any way.
To modify the brightness of the screen, we simply have to right click on the desktop and enter screen settings .
It will be faster if we use the keyboard shortcut that notebooks always have to manage the brightness manually.
It goes without saying that modifying the screen resolution from Windows will not change consumption at all , because physically we will have the same pixels working on the screen.
The lighting of the keyboard or the one that the laptop itself has if it is a gaming design, will also make the battery drain faster. Although they are elements that consume only a few mWh, everything counts, and deactivating them will give us a few extra minutes.
Dark mode, ideal for OLED panels and Tablets
Windows has a dark mode that can also improve the autonomy of the laptop in case it has an OLED screen . This type of screen generates the image with electroluminescent pixels, that is, they do not have a backlight and it is the pixels themselves that generate the light.
To activate the dark mode we must right click on desktop > Personalize> Colors . In this window we will choose Dark in the upper drop-down list.
And what about TN, VA or IPS displays ? Well, dark mode won’t do any good , as these LCD-based displays have constant backlighting. What the pixel panel actually does is block the light from this backlight, thus generating the colors. In them, we can only vary the brightness to improve consumption .
Avoid using peripherals with RGB
The peripherals obviously also consume battery power, so the less we have connected the better. Especially high speed ports like USB 3.2 Gen 2 or Thunderbolt use higher power to transfer data.
If these peripherals have RGB gaming lighting they will consume even more power, so we should establish a profile with the light off while we do not use the power plug. We will do this from the control software that includes each peripheral.
Delete background apps and shared services
Having an optimized operating system is a guarantee that our processor and memory are consuming less resources. The greater the activity, the more electrical power the components will require and the more consumption there will be.
A first evaluation of the situation of our laptop will be to go to the Task Manager , available in the drop-down menu of the taskbar or by doing Ctrl + Shift + Esc.
In a well-optimized operating system we should find a CPU working between 5 to 15% of capacity in case of not being doing anything. By ordering the processes by CPU consumption we will be able to identify those that are consuming the most energy. We could get surprises and identify suspicious processes or those that are not working well. The same can happen with RAM, hard drive activity, Graphics card or Wi-Fi consumption.
It will be the moment to deactivate useless programs that load at startup, which we will find in the Startup tab of the Task Manager . We can also go to the Settings panel and uninstall those others that we do not use, or that we consider suspicious.
Do undervolting (the key)
Undervolting means lowering the CPU voltage in pursuit of lower power consumption and improved temperatures. It is therefore a procedure that involves working directly with power and frequency parameters of the CPU, something that usually commands respect for inexperienced users.
Undervolting will be especially useful in laptops with high-powered processors , such as the Intel Core i5, i7 or i9, or AMD Ryzen, but it can be practiced on anyone. Many times the power control of the board errs from using too high a voltage on the CPU, causing it to consume much more and causing temperatures to skyrocket to 90 o C or more.
By adjusting parameters such as TDP, voltage or frequency , we could be able to greatly reduce temperatures. This would cause the overall performance to be improved even working at lower frequencies. It is a key practice to improve the autonomy of any laptop.
- How to undervolting an Intel laptop with XTU
- Undervolting an AMD processor
- Undervolting to AMD Radeon graphics card
Although in some cases we do it in desktop components, the procedure will be similar in laptops. In the case of Ryzen processors, we must use Ryzen Master in laptops.
Adjust fan profile
After having performed (or not) an undervolting in the previous section, it would be advisable to take care of adjusting the cooling profile of our laptop. The fans are components that use a 12V voltage and consume around 5W at maximum performance.
Although it is potentially possible to do it on any computer using applications such as SpeedFan, we recommend doing it on those laptops that have integrated control software . For example, MSI with Dragon Center, Asus with Armory Crate, or Acer with Predator Sense. It will be interesting to do it on gaming-oriented or high-performance laptops .
A silent profile will be the most recommended in case of using the laptop in battery mode, since the performance of the processor, and therefore the temperatures, will be much lower in most cases. We must pay special attention to Max-Q laptops, which due to having a much fairer cooling system can experience high temperatures even using only the battery.
Disable the dedicated graphics card
When we have equipment that includes both a dedicated and integrated graphics card , it will be useful to disable the dedicated card to improve the autonomy of the laptop . For those who do not know, an integrated card is one that is inside the CPU itself, for example, the Intel UHD Graphics or the AMD Radeon Graphics. On the contrary, a dedicated card is an independent chip that has its own VRAM memory, being much more powerful than integrated graphics .
When we only use the battery and we do not intend to play games or use demanding 3D applications, pulling integrated graphics will be more than enough to work. Turning off the dedicated GPU will save a lot of energy on our equipment.
In case we have an Nvidia GPU, we must open the Nvidia control panel , located in the right area of the taskbar. We must go to the Control 3D configuration section.
In the Global Settings section we will display the Preferred graphics processor tab . We will select the Integrated Graphics option.
In the case of having a dedicated AMD Radeon graphics card, we will do a similar procedure in the Radeon Adrenalin software, although we do not have screenshots for it. All Intel notebook processors have integrated graphics, and the same goes for current AMD Ryzen Mobile processors.
Some brand-name control programs such as MSI Dragon Center have a switch to enable or disable the use of the dedicated graphics card . We could make use of it in case that option is implemented.
Another slightly more extreme way of doing this is through the BIOS, although it does not make much sense to waste the dedicated graphics when we have the CPU connected to the power.
Limit the screen refresh rate
One last action that will improve the autonomy of the laptop will be to limit the refresh rate of the computer monitor, which will save a good number of Watts if we are not using the gaming laptop.
This procedure makes more sense for gaming equipment , whose screens are usually around 120, 144 and even 240 Hz. Sometimes from the Nvidia graphics driver it is possible to do this, but in most cases, the screen configuration will not be available, so we must do it from another way. The procedure will be as follows:
We will access the Screen Settings by displaying the menu from the desktop with the right button. We navigate to the screen section to access the Advanced Screen Settings.
In the new window, we will click on the only option available Show display adapter properties 1.
This will open a new properties window in which we will go to the Monitor tab.
Finally we will display the list of refresh rate options and choose one lower than the current one, in case the monitor operates at a high frequency. The recommended minimum will be 60 Hz, since below this we will experience a choppy image and will tire the eyes.
Conclusions
These are the most outstanding actions that will give us the best results when it comes to improving the autonomy of a laptop. As we mentioned at the beginning, there are no miracles in this of autonomy, and sometimes the room for improvement is less than we expected.
You have to pay attention to the power profiles and the hardware management that the applications do sometimes is not the best. It’s not the first time we’ve run into bad optimizations for a certain laptop model draining the battery faster than it should.
The BIOS optimization that the manufacturer has done also has a great influence . For this reason, whenever the computer notifies us that there is a new BIOS available, we must accept for it to be installed.
