Windows 10 update could soon help make your laptop battery last longer

Change which is in testing could help notebook users beat the battery blues

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Windows 10could receive a tweak to its system of tracking your laptop battery usage, with the idea being to introduce graphs which show you more detail about when the battery is being hammered.

You can already look at the apps which are sapping the most power from your notebook battery, based on a certain time period – such as the past week – but with this new change,Microsoftis providing a full graph of recent battery usage too.

AsWindows Latestreports, this is happening with the Battery panel (in the Settings app) in preview build 21277, and theoretically it should progress to be deployed in the 21H2 update forWindows 10. In other words, the big update for the second half of next year; unless Microsoft ditches the idea of course.

As it stands in preview, the battery usage graphs give you a daily or hourly breakdown – over the last week, or 24 hours respectively – of how much your battery was being used, so you can see when it was hit most heavily (and drill-down further in the battery Settings panel to find out which app or apps may have been killers in terms of battery longevity).

Charge log

The new feature which may be inbound also provides extra nuggets of info such as allowing the user to see when they last charged their laptop, which is sometimes a question we’re asking ourselves (in a ‘didn’t we just charge this thing yesterday?’ fashion).

Windows 10 21H2 is expected to bring in a large number of changes, and will be a major feature update thatcompletely revamps the desktop interface, according to strongrumorswhich have been around for quite some time now.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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