I am stuck with an older PC laptop and it doesn’t have great battery life. But I want to be able to watch movies! Are there some easy ways to maximize battery life on my Win11 PC when I’m watching movies or other video content?
Batteries keep getting better capacity and better charging characteristics even as our operating systems require more of our computers. The result is that while vendors claim amazing battery life for new gear, by the time you’ve owned a computer for a few months, you might well be getting half that best-case power duration. With older computers it can be even worse because those batteries might have “forgotten” how to fully charge, meaning that even when you leave it plugged in, it’s only getting 70%, 80%, 85% charge at best.
Fortunately, among the zillion different settings and options, there are definitely some in Windows 11 that are specifically aimed at battery life during video playback. In fact, it’s clearly a common question and something quite a few people fiddle and adjust! Before your next flight overseas, let’s see what options and settings you can tweak to maximize that battery life…
THE EASIEST STEP: ADJUST BRIGHTNESS
It might seem obvious, but the simplest way to extend your battery life is to lower your brightness. Turns out that having your display at 100% brightness consumes a lot of power, even versus 75%, and if you’re in a darker environment, you might be able to get hours of additional battery life by reducing brightness even further.
The easy way to adjust this is to click on the shortcut tray icons along the Taskbar. A window with shortcuts pops up, including both volume and brightness:
Lowering volume can help too, but you might already be using earbuds or headphones, which require less power than driving an actual speaker, even the little one built into your PC. Certainly, adjust the brightness down as much as you can tolerate to gain more battery life.
MOVING INTO WIN11 SETTINGS
Moving into the Settings area of Windows, there are a number of different options you can enable to help out too.
Start with System > Display:
Yes, this is yet another place you can adjust brightness, but you might want to investigate night light too, because it can lower power requirements for video playback when enabled (and protect your eyes from blue light too). Click on “HDR” here for High Dynamic Range settings…
If you have a system that isn’t HDR capable, you won’t have the above options, but most modern PCs do offer this. Choose “Optimize for battery life” for the battery option if you can; it too will help!
Now move to the Power & Battery section in Settings.
Here, again, you’ll have a pop-up offering choices for “Power mode“. Choose either “Balanced” or “Best power efficiency”. Definitely, “Best performance” will not be your friend in this setting! If you’re so inclined, you can also check out “Power consumption and carbon emissions” or “Energy recommendations” but I find that if you enable them all, your PC becomes almost unusable on a day-to-day basis. Your experience will undoubtedly vary.
VIDEO PLAYBACK OPTIONS
Finally, back up to Apps, then choose “Video playback” and you’ll find a very interesting window:
You can experiment with different settings and use the preview video to know when you’ve gone too far in your tweaks, but generally, the most important setting here is the last: “Play video at a lower resolution when on battery“. I recommend you try this and if it’s not annoying, keep it as your default.
Together, all of these settings should let you get a lot more battery life out of your older Windows PC. Good luck and enjoy your movie watching. Didja know I’m a movie critic too? You can find my film reviews over at PlanetDave.com/movies/ if you want to read a few!
Become a Windows Power User: I’ve been writing about Windows for many years and have an extensive Windows 11 help library here. Please check it out while you’re visiting. Thanks!