Triple your Battery Life for FREE! THIS METHOD REALLY WORKS!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,515 words · ~7 min read
0:00
it's a living nightmare you've got critically important stuff to do but
0:05
your laptop is dying and you have no way to charge it so you go into desperation
0:10
mode trying all the wacky battery saving
0:13
tips that you read about online turning the brightness down turning down your
0:18
screen resolution installing a battery
0:21
optimization app that runs in the background what yeah so with all the
0:28
outlandish advice out there we couldn't
0:31
resist quantitatively testing the internet's current most popular battery
0:37
saving techniques to determine once and for all just how much more life down to
0:43
the minute these tricks can get you so get amped because the results May shock
0:58
you G skills km780r RGB mechanical keyboard
1:04
features a brushed aluminum top plate on the Fly macro recording and different
1:09
Cherry MX switch configurations learn more at the link
1:13
below let's start with the worst case
1:16
scenario using PC Mark's home conventional battery life test we
1:20
managed to get am measly 2 hours and 38
1:24
minutes of battery out of the 2017 HP Spectre X 360 that we Ed for the bulk of
1:30
our tests a product that boasts up to 15
1:34
hours of battery life on its product page so we achieved this dubious feat by
1:41
connecting a set of high-end peripherals with the screen at full brightness the
1:46
balanced power plan the keyboard backlight enabled the screen at Full
1:49
Resolution bluetooth enabled and Wi-Fi connected all right then so first things
1:55
first how much juice can we save by removing our RGB Mouse and this op
2:01
backlit keyboard that actually uses two USB type A ports holy cow we just
2:08
boosted our battery by 25 to 30% more
2:12
than I actually would have thought and even more interesting with less gangster
2:17
peripherals we are still looking at over 20% shorter battery life than the
2:23
onboard input devices so pulling out
2:26
does work now you know
2:31
what about disabling the USB ports or other devices outright we ran one test
2:37
with the USB ports disabled and another
2:40
with the webcam and IR emitters
2:43
disabled but other than being a good idea for privacy neither of these
2:48
produced any savings above our 4% margin
2:52
of error so it looks like the internet got that one wrong the next one seems
2:56
pretty credible though Samsung even has a setting built into the new Galaxy S8
3:02
to run the screen at a lower resolution to save power so we went from 4K all the
3:08
way down to 800x 600 with results that
3:12
frankly didn't justify the awful user
3:16
experience of that resolution at 6%
3:19
we're only just above our margin of error the results from our keyboard
3:24
backlight test though were so surprising
3:27
that we ran this one three times and it's official turning off the back lit
3:33
keyboard netted us an average of about 16% more juice though your mileage may
3:39
vary high-powered gaming machines with bigger batteries might not see such a
3:44
large impact but what about the
3:47
brightness of the screen turning your
3:50
brightness down from Max to 50% saved us
3:55
the exact same amount as turning off the
3:58
keyboard backlight outright but this is where it gets crazy
4:04
turning brightness all the way down to minimum from there doesn't double these
4:10
savings we only got an additional
4:13
4% but how can that be well it turns out
4:18
that your eyes don't perceive brightness linearly so it takes a lot more power to
4:24
brighten your screen from 50% to Max
4:27
than it does from minimum to 50% the
4:31
more you know and here's another twist
4:34
pretty much everyone agrees that disabling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with
4:39
airplane mode will boost battery life
4:42
but nope we tested this one three times
4:45
as well then we thought maybe this
4:49
airplane mode thing sucks let's turn off both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth manually still
4:55
nope so it turns out that modern Wireless chipsets don't suck much power
5:01
when they're idle so even though our machine was connected to a network the
5:05
whole time we didn't see much of a difference but you should note that in a
5:11
low signal strength scenario or if it was searching for a network that drain
5:16
would likely be much more noticeable but
5:19
hold on a second lonus I'm always on the internet when I'm using my computer what
5:25
if Wi-Fi isn't idle okay great question
5:29
for that we'll need a new test so we took everything we learned in Phase 1
5:34
and collected a new set of Baseline data
5:37
that we feel is more representative of the real world so our notebook is
5:42
running at 50% brightness and full resolution with our devices enabled our
5:47
peripherals disconnected and our keyboard backlight on then we added a
5:53
more real world load YouTube videos so
5:57
compared to just sitting there staring staring at the desktop with nothing
6:01
running streaming a brain splattering
6:04
240p video reduced battery life by
6:08
29% but you guys don't watch potato
6:11
content you stream in 4k so that's going to cost you about
6:17
another 8 to 10% more battery life and
6:21
that's just to see the video listening to it has a price too compared to having
6:26
the machine muted maxing out the speakers cost us an additional 12 to 14%
6:33
battery all right then but what about all that crap that you yes you have
6:38
running in the background well we opened
6:41
up a bunch of apps and extra browser tabs to see how the system holds up and
6:47
compared to our Baseline these
6:50
relatively common background tasks
6:53
actually cut our battery life in half
6:57
although it should be noted that you can mitigate some of this with an alternate
7:03
power plan so we tested Windows's
7:06
recommended balanced mode against power
7:09
saver with and without background tasks
7:13
with very impressive results power saver
7:16
interacts with your machine's Hardware capping your CPU's performance or
7:21
prioritizing passive cooling before active cooling then we tried battery
7:27
saver this feature interacts with software limiting the activity of
7:32
background apps stopping live tile updates and blocking push
7:36
notifications battery saver only affects universal Windows platform apps so
7:42
applications from the Windows store but it just happens that Skype slack and
7:47
Spotify are all WP apps hence the
7:51
significant boost in our results so then if you find yourself in
7:57
a battery life for death situation you
8:01
can count on our tips in order of importance to achieve as much as triple
8:06
the endurance while keeping your system in what we would still consider to be a
8:10
very usable State step one exit as many
8:13
background programs as your type A personality will allow step two turn on
8:18
battery saver and if you're not doing something intensive like gaming throw on
8:22
power saver too note that by default these actions may also dim your screen
8:27
but you can adjust that after step three Nick the extra keyboard and mouse
8:31
productivity Is for Suckers anyway step four dim your screen to a reasonable
8:36
level and don't use your keyboard backlight during the day step five turn
8:42
down your volume or use headphones instead of speakers you're probably just
8:46
annoying people anyway damn kids step
8:49
six if you're streaming video dial back
8:52
the quality a little bit and step seven are you guys still here if you want to
8:58
go ahead and set set a '90s resolution for 6% savings then power to you I guess
9:05
a final electrifying tip something that we couldn't test for what I hope are
9:10
fairly obvious reasons put your machine in narcolepsy mode so that it doesn't
9:15
waste any precious energy when it's not in use then once you've done all those
9:19
things you should have achieved true
9:22
battery life Zen
9:28
oh
9:32
oh tunnel bear is the simple to use VPN
9:36
app that makes it easy to browse the internet privately and enjoy a more open
9:42
internet with tunnel bear turned on your connection gets secured with AES 256bit
9:48
encryption and your online activity is kept private from your internet provider
9:53
advertisers or really just anyone looking to track what you're doing or
9:58
profit from your dat data tunnel bear has a top rated privacy policy and does
10:02
not log your activity and you can try it for free with 500 megabytes of data
10:07
included with no credit card required if
10:10
you choose to get a year of unlimited data you can save 10% by going to Tunnel
10:14
bear.com SL LTT so thanks for watching guys if this
10:19
video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that
10:22
like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured at
10:25
Amazon in the video description also link down there is our store which has
10:29
cool shirts like this one and our community Forum which you should totally
10:34
join