it's a living nightmare you've got critically important stuff to do but
your laptop is dying and you have no way to charge it so you go into desperation
mode trying all the wacky battery saving
tips that you read about online turning the brightness down turning down your
screen resolution installing a battery
optimization app that runs in the background what yeah so with all the
outlandish advice out there we couldn't
resist quantitatively testing the internet's current most popular battery
saving techniques to determine once and for all just how much more life down to
the minute these tricks can get you so get amped because the results May shock
you G skills km780r RGB mechanical keyboard
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below let's start with the worst case
scenario using PC Mark's home conventional battery life test we
managed to get am measly 2 hours and 38
minutes of battery out of the 2017 HP Spectre X 360 that we Ed for the bulk of
our tests a product that boasts up to 15
hours of battery life on its product page so we achieved this dubious feat by
connecting a set of high-end peripherals with the screen at full brightness the
balanced power plan the keyboard backlight enabled the screen at Full
Resolution bluetooth enabled and Wi-Fi connected all right then so first things
first how much juice can we save by removing our RGB Mouse and this op
backlit keyboard that actually uses two USB type A ports holy cow we just
boosted our battery by 25 to 30% more
than I actually would have thought and even more interesting with less gangster
peripherals we are still looking at over 20% shorter battery life than the
onboard input devices so pulling out
does work now you know
what about disabling the USB ports or other devices outright we ran one test
with the USB ports disabled and another
with the webcam and IR emitters
disabled but other than being a good idea for privacy neither of these
produced any savings above our 4% margin
of error so it looks like the internet got that one wrong the next one seems
pretty credible though Samsung even has a setting built into the new Galaxy S8
to run the screen at a lower resolution to save power so we went from 4K all the
way down to 800x 600 with results that
frankly didn't justify the awful user
experience of that resolution at 6%
we're only just above our margin of error the results from our keyboard
backlight test though were so surprising
that we ran this one three times and it's official turning off the back lit
keyboard netted us an average of about 16% more juice though your mileage may
vary high-powered gaming machines with bigger batteries might not see such a
large impact but what about the
brightness of the screen turning your
brightness down from Max to 50% saved us
the exact same amount as turning off the
keyboard backlight outright but this is where it gets crazy
turning brightness all the way down to minimum from there doesn't double these
savings we only got an additional
4% but how can that be well it turns out
that your eyes don't perceive brightness linearly so it takes a lot more power to
brighten your screen from 50% to Max
than it does from minimum to 50% the
more you know and here's another twist
pretty much everyone agrees that disabling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with
airplane mode will boost battery life
but nope we tested this one three times
as well then we thought maybe this
airplane mode thing sucks let's turn off both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth manually still
nope so it turns out that modern Wireless chipsets don't suck much power
when they're idle so even though our machine was connected to a network the
whole time we didn't see much of a difference but you should note that in a
low signal strength scenario or if it was searching for a network that drain
would likely be much more noticeable but
hold on a second lonus I'm always on the internet when I'm using my computer what
if Wi-Fi isn't idle okay great question
for that we'll need a new test so we took everything we learned in Phase 1
and collected a new set of Baseline data
that we feel is more representative of the real world so our notebook is
running at 50% brightness and full resolution with our devices enabled our
peripherals disconnected and our keyboard backlight on then we added a
more real world load YouTube videos so
compared to just sitting there staring staring at the desktop with nothing
running streaming a brain splattering
240p video reduced battery life by
29% but you guys don't watch potato
content you stream in 4k so that's going to cost you about
another 8 to 10% more battery life and
that's just to see the video listening to it has a price too compared to having
the machine muted maxing out the speakers cost us an additional 12 to 14%
battery all right then but what about all that crap that you yes you have
running in the background well we opened
up a bunch of apps and extra browser tabs to see how the system holds up and
compared to our Baseline these
relatively common background tasks
actually cut our battery life in half
although it should be noted that you can mitigate some of this with an alternate
power plan so we tested Windows's
recommended balanced mode against power
saver with and without background tasks
with very impressive results power saver
interacts with your machine's Hardware capping your CPU's performance or
prioritizing passive cooling before active cooling then we tried battery
saver this feature interacts with software limiting the activity of
background apps stopping live tile updates and blocking push
notifications battery saver only affects universal Windows platform apps so
applications from the Windows store but it just happens that Skype slack and
Spotify are all WP apps hence the
significant boost in our results so then if you find yourself in
a battery life for death situation you
can count on our tips in order of importance to achieve as much as triple
the endurance while keeping your system in what we would still consider to be a
very usable State step one exit as many
background programs as your type A personality will allow step two turn on
battery saver and if you're not doing something intensive like gaming throw on
power saver too note that by default these actions may also dim your screen
but you can adjust that after step three Nick the extra keyboard and mouse
productivity Is for Suckers anyway step four dim your screen to a reasonable
level and don't use your keyboard backlight during the day step five turn
down your volume or use headphones instead of speakers you're probably just
annoying people anyway damn kids step
six if you're streaming video dial back
the quality a little bit and step seven are you guys still here if you want to
go ahead and set set a '90s resolution for 6% savings then power to you I guess
a final electrifying tip something that we couldn't test for what I hope are
fairly obvious reasons put your machine in narcolepsy mode so that it doesn't
waste any precious energy when it's not in use then once you've done all those
things you should have achieved true
battery life Zen
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