Best battery life when mobile, best performance when plugged in to the wall. Yes please.
Sometimes a feature seems so obvious, but once it’s been implemented you wonder why it wasn’t always there in the first place. If you’re the proud owner of a gaming laptop, rejoice, for the latest Windows 11 Insider Canary build finally lets you pick different power modes depending on whether you’re plugged in, or running off the battery.
Windows 11 Build 27686 adds the new settings to the power menu, with drop-down boxes for both plugged-in and on-battery settings—allowing you to choose from options like Best Performance, Balanced or Best Power Efficiency (via Bleeping Computer) for each.
This allows you to ramp up performance for when you’re plugged into the wall and set it to a power-efficient mode for when you’re on the battery—eeking out a little more battery life for travel and gaining a boost when you’re pushing your machine in demanding tasks. Of course, Windows 11 does have advanced power settings that help in this regard, but you’d need to fiddle around in the old control panel to find them.
It won’t be a huge amount of performance or battery life gained here, granted, but every little helps, especially when it comes to squeezing out some more minutes from your laptop. Changing the new settings should take a little bit of the pressure off in stressful scenarios like, I don’t know, writing a time-sensitive article in an airport lounge while all the plugs are taken up. Ask me how I know.
You’ll have to be part of the Windows Insider Program on the Canary channel to enable the feature currently, and it’s a pretty easy thing to do. Canary builds can be unstable, though, so you might be better off waiting until it hopefully turns up in more Windows 11 builds.
It’s not the only new feature worth talking about in the latest build, either. The arbitrary 32 GB size limit for FAT32 partitions has now been bumped up to 2 TB, and there’s a new HDR streaming feature to tinker with, too. It doesn’t fix the mess that is HDR gaming on a Windows machine, but we can all keep praying for that eventual update, can’t we?
In the meantime, some long overdue power setting segmentation for mobile devices is certainly a useful feature. While Windows has always performed a degree of power adjustment when switching between the battery and the outlet, allowing you to set the options yourself is a nice win for giving more control to the user. More power to your elbow, as we Brits say, or in this case, more (or less) power to your laptop, too.
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