Here’s How to Use Windows Task Manager to See Which Apps Drain Your Battery

Dennis Snider

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Over the years, laptops have become incredibly powerful and given the convenience they offer through portability, it’s little wonder that businesses and individuals are turning to them more frequently. Hardware is getting smaller and more powerful, meaning that the performance gap between laptops and desktop computers is steadily becoming narrower.

The big issue with laptops is battery power.
As the years progress, laptop owners will find that their laptop battery becomes less and less effective. The battery fails to hold a charge and this makes working remotely without a power outlet very difficult – the key advantage of a laptop is lost.
There is a tool in Task Manager, though, that can help you to optimize the performance of your battery.

Making the Most of Task Manager
This type of degradation over time is totally normal and it’s one of the issues with battery technology. The speed with which your battery drains is also determined, though, in part by the activity that you’re performing on the computer.
If you’re watching a movie on the laptop, for example, it’s normal that the battery will run down quicker. But your computer will have hundreds of processes running in the background and some of these will be using more power than others.
In October 2018, Microsoft released a Windows 10 update that bolstered the Task Manager and equipped it with some new functionality. Now, users will find that there is a host of additional information provided about the power that a particular application is using.

Accessing Task Manager is simple: you can search for it using the search box, right-click the taskbar and select it from the menu, or use the keyboard shortcut by pressing ctrl-shift-esc.
The two new columns are “power usage” and “power usage trend”.
The “power usage” column gives an estimate as to whether an app is using a low or high amount of power. There will naturally be a correlation between CPU and memory usage, and it’s interesting to see how the machine itself estimates the amount of power an application is using.
The “power trend” column will only be populated with data after a couple of minutes, and it will show how much power has been used over that period of time. This helps to give you a more balanced sample rather than a snapshot.

This is a useful trick that can help you to see which apps are using the most power, and help you to get the most from your laptop battery. Closing those apps which are using high amounts of power can help your battery last longer.