

Related: Calibrate the laptop battery for a more accurate charge display Tick the box if you prefer to maximise the life of the battery.


It is up to you whether you enable it or not. There is also a new setting and this is Allow video to play at a lower resolution when on battery. In the Video playback section there is a choice of optimising the video for battery life or for video quality. It is now in a different section and you get there by clicking Change the battery settings for playing video. There used to be an option to save battery while watching videos, but this has moved. These haven’t changed much and there is the usual slider to determine when the battery saver feature automatically turns on. Is this an improvement?Ĭlick Battery settings in this panel and the battery options in the Settings app is displayed. This is much simpler than before, but it does take a lot of customisation options out of the hands of expert users who could tweak the power settings for individual components. Drag it to the left to increase battery life or drag it to the right to increase performance. (It will take years at the current slow pace of change though.)Ĭlick the battery/power icon in the taskbar and there is now a simple slider for adjusting the power settings. However, Windows 10 is steadily replacing Control Panel functions with new settings and gadgets. Should you recreate your power plans? It does no harm and it just adds to your options when configuring your laptop for battery use. However, if Create a power plan on the left is clicked, there are options to recreate power plans that were deleted by Windows Update. You can change the plan settings, but there are no other power plans.

Here is what Power Options in the Control Panel looks like for some people. You may find that there is just the Balanced plan remaining and no option to select any others. If you look in the Control panel Power Options your old power plans may have disappeared with a Windows update and it can delete them. In the past we had several different plans to choose from, such as Balanced, Power saver, High performance, and perhaps a manufacturer specific one. Windows power plans have always been in the Control Panel in the Power Options section, but this was changed in a Windows update. Among them have been changes to power plans and potentially longer battery life from your laptop. Major Windows 10 updates arrive twice a year and there are many changes.
