Your laptop's battery life may be dropping faster than you think

One test showed a laptop's battery life dropping by as much as two and a half hours in about a year’s time.

- MARK HACHMAN

Most laptop and CPU makers encourage you to upgrade your PC because its performance can’t keep up with the latest hardware. But there’s another, more compelling reason that’s largely ignored: Your laptop’s battery life will become significantly worse as time goes by.

How much battery life will diminish depends on a number of factors. But here’s my anecdotal report, based on my day-to-day use: In just a year’s time, my laptop’s battery capacity has dropped by a whopping 16 percent.

That’s a real-life number, based on realworld use. Though I swap back and forth between a number of test laptops for various uses, I typically leave a Surface Laptop Studio plugged in during the day; it’s also the test bed for powering my evaluations of the best Thunderbolt docks (fave.co/3vtA0BE). As our Surface Laptop Studio review (fave.co/

off and forgotten about it, or, more likely, the feature stopped working. At some point the Windows 11 Taskbar began showing a small exclamation point next to the battery, which also appeared in the battery submenu in the Windows 11 Settings. I couldn’t find anything wrong with the battery, but after checking the Surface app I was unable to turn on smart charging. Clicking the button simply wouldn’t work.

So that’s not that big a deal, right? Well, no. We use the excellent, though hidden, Windows battery report tool (fave. co/3j1YK1E) to learn more about how much battery power is available to a PC, and it’s a quick and effective reference. (See the linked story for details and how to use it.)