How to Find Out Which Apps Drain Your Laptop’s Battery the Most
If you’re out and about with your laptop, or simply in a different room than the charging cable, you need to spend as much time as possible before the next charge, and an important part of this is knowing which apps drain your battery the fastest.
Once you know who is most to blame for your battery drain, you can do something about it. Perhaps you can use the programs in question less often, enable some battery-saving features (if available), or remove them altogether and switch to less power-hungry alternatives.
Take Google Chrome, for example, a program not known for its easy access to system resources. If you find that this is putting a lot of strain on your battery, you can turn on the power saving feature , or perhaps just be more careful about how many tabs you have open at once.
Here’s how to track the apps using the most battery life on Windows and macOS.
Tracking Applications in Windows
Load the Settings screen from the Start menu, then select System and Power & Battery . If you click Battery Usage , you’ll see how your laptop’s battery level has dropped over the last 24 hours or over the last seven days (open the drop-down menu on the right to switch between the two time periods).
Below the main graph, you should see a list of programs that were responsible for draining your battery over the last day or last week, with the biggest battery drainers listed at the top. If you can’t immediately see the app you want to check, scroll down the list or use the search field just above the list. If an app doesn’t appear, it means it didn’t impact your battery level during the selected time period.
The drop-down menu in the Sort by section allows you to organize apps by name rather than by battery usage. You can also choose to view programs based on how much battery life they’ve used while in use, while running in the background, or both (which is probably the most useful metric).
For some apps, you can click the three dots next to them and select Manage Background Activity to reduce the drain on your battery when they’re not in use. This feature is mostly available in native Windows applications, including Notepad and Paint, and will take you to that application’s settings.
Tracking apps on macOS
On macOS, you can start investigating by clicking the battery icon in the menu bar in the top right corner of the screen. This will show you which of the apps you’re currently open are “consuming a significant amount of power,” so you’ll likely see your web browser or video editing software here.
Click Battery Settings in the same pop-up dialog box and you’ll see how your MacBook’s battery has been draining over the last 24 hours or the last 10 days (use the tab switcher just above to switch between these two views). You can also enable low power mode and other battery options (such as dimming the screen when running on battery).
What you can’t do on this screen is learn more about which apps are using up your battery—there’s no simple list like there is in Windows. Instead, load Activity Monitor from Spotlight or the Utilities folder in Finder, then switch to the Energy tab. You’ll see which apps are currently using the most battery, and which have been the most power-hungry in the last 12 hours.
To limit which apps can run in both the background and foreground on your MacBook (which again can affect battery life), you’ll need to head back to System Preferences (via the Apple menu). Open the General tab, then click Login Items and Extensions , and you’ll get a series of permission switches for any installed programs that have requested to run in the background.