You’re on an airplane. You’re in the park. You’re nowhere near an outlet, and you desperately need to squeeze the maximum endurance out of your notebook so you can finish what you’re doing before your PC’s energy well runs dry. You’ve probably heard that certain tricks—such as lowering your screen brightness all the way or changing your wallpaper to black—can give you a few more crucial minutes of battery life, but do any of these things really work?
To find out, we took four possible battery-saving settings and measured the effect each one had on our test notebook, the Toshiba Satellite M505. This Intel Core i3 system’s initial time on the Notebook batteries provide power to the system whenever it’s unplugged.
Learn MoreLAPTOP Battery Test was more than a little disappointing. On our standard test, which features continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi at 40-percent brightness, the 14.0-inch laptop lasted a measly 3 hours and 11 minutes. We made the following changes and measured the effect each had on that initial time.