windows 11 ships with a way to speed up your laptop's performance
absolutely for free so the question is if you're not using this method why aren't you
hi everyone i'm mark cochman with pc world and today we're going to be talking about windows
11 specialized power management controls which includes a way to speed up your pc so let's dive
right in windows 11 settings menu includes this sub-menu the power and battery submenu which leads
here to the power mode setting now on windows 10 we refer to this as the power slider and it lived
down here in the taskbar but in windows 11 it's been banished to the settings menu now the way to
optimize your pc is to simply change this drop down menu from recommended to best performance
because you know why not now you'll find with some laptop makers maybe a dell maybe a lenovo that
they have a choice of optimizing their laptops and they may choose to optimize them for battery life
they may choose to optimize them for performance or they may simply select somewhere in between
so for example you might find on some laptops that this is the recommended setting and this is
changed to best battery life but on other laptop makers such as microsoft this choice becomes even
more interesting and that's because most surface devices are shipped in this best battery life
recommended mode now the reason for this is probably fairly obvious microsoft envisions a
world where surface devices roam between meeting to meeting and run apps like word and powerpoint
but in a case where a laptop is at home and connected to a power charger and might be
running a few games in the evening you want to have a situation where you can optimize for best
performance now the question you might be asking yourself is what does best performance mean and
it varies from laptop to laptop and from benchmark to benchmark but in this case we can look at one
and this is the cinebench benchmark which accompanied the review our review of the microsoft
surface book 3. and in this case cinebench is running all threads in all cores at once so it's
equivalent to say a photoshop but we can see that in the default mode it generated a score of 693.
in best performance mode it generated a score of 750 will save you from doing the math it's
about an eight percent difference now you might be thinking to yourself okay eight
percent's not that much but again remember it's free it's adjustable by a single click
and so we think this is significant now at this point you might be asking yourself is this
overclocking and if you've heard that term before you know that it means that it pushes a cpu or
gpu or memory beyond the thermal limits that are set by the manufacturer this is not overclocking
overclocking will invalidate your warranty or potentially invalidate your warranty this will not
what we're doing here is simply adjusting the performance and battery life parameters
within what the manufacturer in this case microsoft setup now that sums up the way in which
you can optimize your pc but if you wouldn't mind sticking around just for a couple more minutes
i wanted to show you a couple more features of the powered battery settings within windows
and there's two things that are interesting one is what we call smart charging smart charging is
most commonly found on surface devices i think it's also i think typical of windows 11 and not
windows 10. what it does is it takes the conventional wisdom of charging a battery
on a laptop or a smartphone and automates it essentially and that's to say that this uh
with a smartphone or a laptop you'll get the most battery life over the life of the device
if you don't fully charge the device or you don't let it fully diminish to zero percent
what this does is it charges the laptop up to eighty percent and no higher or in this case
seventy nine percent uh preserving the longevity of the battery over the lifespan of the laptop
now you might be asking yourself okay i wanna go on a business trip though i want 100 battery how
do i do that well it's going to change from laptop to laptop but in this case it's controlled by the
surface app an app that you probably don't go to that much if you actually own a service but in
this case you can go to the surface app select pause and it will in fact charge your battery
up to 100 percent over the normal charging period the other thing that i wanted to show you is the
battery usage and battery usage isn't something that you need to look at but it's interesting
it'll show you the usage of course of the laptop itself but it'll also show you the usage of the
individual apps on the machine as well in this case you'll notice that cortana is generating a 75
usage which looks a little extreme especially because i don't use it all that much so
from my standpoint i'm going to once this video is complete probably turn off cortana and save
myself a little battery in the process so that's a quick tour of the power and battery subsystem
along with a tip on how to improve the performance of your pc for more windows 11 tips and tricks
visit pcworld.com or keep it tuned right here to pc world's youtube channel thanks for watching