 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? 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 features a brushed aluminum top plate on the fly macro recording and Different Cherry MX switch configurations. Learn more at the link below Let's start with the worst case scenario using PCMark's home conventional battery life test We managed to get a measly two hours and 38 minutes of battery out of the 2017 HP Spectre x360 that we used 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. Alright 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 800 by 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 testing 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 backlit 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 Linus. 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 one 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 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 gonna cost you about another eight to ten percent 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 percent 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 machines hardware capping your CPUs 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 UWP apps hence the significant boost in our results so then if you find yourself in a battery life or 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 to Note that by default these actions may also dim your screen, but you can adjust that after step three Knicks 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. They're probably just annoying people anyway ten 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 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 Oh Tunnel bear is the simple to use VPN app that makes it easy to browse the internet privately and Enjoy a more open internet with tunnel bear turned on your connection gets secured with AES 256 bit encryption and your online activity is kept private from your internet provider advertisers are really just anyone looking to Track what you're doing or profit from your data Tunnel bear has a top rated privacy policy and does not log your activity and you can try it for free with 500 megabytes of data included with no credit card required if you choose to get a year of unlimited data You can save 10% by going to tunnel bear comm slash LTT So thanks for watching guys if this video sucked You know what to do, but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the Stuff we featured at Amazon in the video description also link down There's our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join you