Longer laptop battery life with Windows 10
Microsoft talking about better power management in Windows 10 several months ago. Something about waking the CPU up less often. Australia leading notebook batteries supplier: BattAussie battery experts had a devil of a time trying to figure out whether Windows 10 is helping or hurting when it comes to laptop battery life. The answer: It’s complicated.
Windows 10 is currently a technical preview that includes monitoring of your usage of the OS. Any outcome of a battery test will probably be polluted by the amount of code execution that collects telemetry data in Windows 10 at this point, which might be code that’s not even optimized for low power consumption.
Windows 10 Laptop Battery Life Is Better
Our battery experts have been measuring laptop battery life across four different Windows laptops: two versions of the superlative Dell XPS 13, one excellent HP Spectre x360, and Lenovo ThinkPad X240. This entire week, I’ve been running hp 2230s battery life tests almost every night, along with real-world tests during the day, to figure out how long they last. We tested Windows 8.1 against Windows 10.
The reason we’ve had to do it almost every night is that the numbers haven’t been consistent. One day, a Windows 10 laptop would give me one number. The next, two hours less.
Windows 10 silently updates itself in the background, and there’s next to nothing you can do about it. And when it’s updating, I think it’s warming up the processor, which drains the battery power more quickly. How much more quickly? Well, HP Spectre x360 got 6.5 hours of battery life on Windows 8.1. One night, it only managed 5.5 hours on the exact same test. That’s a huge dip!
But the next night, after I let the laptop stay on all day, it managed 7.5 hours. A whole extra hour! The high-res 3200 x 1800 Dell XPS 13 didn’t see a big gain, though. More like breaking even. On Windows 8.1, it managed about 5 hours, and I got about 5 hours with Windows 10.
Lenovo ThinkPad was the most surprising result of the bunch: from 8.5 hours in Windows 8 to a full 10 hours in Windows 10, with its giant secondary ThinkPad T510 battery installed. Hell, it was still running when I woke up the next morning. ThinkPad barely had enough battery life to get home from San Francisco while writing about a hotly-anticipated new smartphone. And I’m pretty sure it was because Windows 10 was downloading those mandatory updates — and using up my LTE data on the train — without giving me a veto option.
So yeah, Windows 10 may actually have better notebook battery life! Except when it doesn’t.
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[…] Microsoft talking about better power management in Windows 10 several months ago. Something about waking the CPU up less often. Australia leading notebook batteries supplier: BattAussie battery experts had a devil of a time trying to figure out whether Windows 10 is helping or hurting when it comes to laptop battery life. The answer: It’s complicated. … […]