Windows 11 Is Making It Easier to Switch Power Modes

When you're using a Windows laptop, setting up and managing your power modes is an essential tool to maintaining battery life. Up until now, you had to dig deep within Control Panel to take care of these tasks, which was a bit of a chore. In a recently released Windows 11 Insider preview on the Canary channel, Microsoft has made it a lot easier to set up power modes. This feature was first spotted on the Windows 11 Dev channel preview build in July 2024, but it's now been shipped to the more stable Canary channel.

With the new release, you'll be able to go to Settings > System > Power & battery to access all the options you'll need. You'll be able to choose a different power mode for when your laptop is plugged in versus when it's running on battery power. This feature is available in Windows Insider Preview Build 27686, which means it's technically still in testing, but you can sign up for an Insider account for free here.

This makes it a lot easier to access power modes and to use them effectively. Power modes effectively allow you to decide how much energy your laptop consumes. When you're gaming, you can set up a high performance power mode in order to ensure that the laptop doesn't throttle performance when you're in the middle of an online game. When you're not doing resource intensive tasks, you can ask your Windows laptop to take a chill pill and conserve its power resources. This will allow you to maximize battery life and is helpful when you know you're going to need the laptop for work, but not sure when you'll be able to charge it next.

It'll be a short while until these features make their way to a main Windows release. Joining the Insider program will let you try them sooner, but remember that being on the Insider rollout schedule means that you'll be running unstable software on your PC.