battery life

Microsoft’s recent nudge to users — asking “what do you miss most in Windows?” — is more than a PR moment; it’s a revealing sign that the company is wrestling with conflicting priorities for Windows 11: glossy AI capabilities and the long list of everyday quality‑of‑life features that power...

Microsoft’s new handheld-focused Xbox Mode — the full-screen, controller-first Xbox experience layered on Windows 11 — is already being run on a wide range of in-market Windows handhelds, and community ports plus an Insider-channel push mean owners of existing devices can try the experience now...

The community has already started peeling back the seams of the ROG Xbox Ally’s new “Xbox Mode,” and hobbyist modders have managed to run the console-style, full‑screen Xbox experience on a range of other Windows handhelds — a development that short-circuits manufacturer timelines, accelerates...

Microsoft’s handheld push has taken a new turn: the Xbox-style, full‑screen “Xbox Mode” that will ship as the default experience on the ROG Xbox Ally family is already appearing on other Windows 11 handhelds — in community builds and hacks — ahead of the Ally’s retail launch, forcing a rapid...

Windows handheld owners who’ve been frustrated by Windows’ desktop baggage can try Microsoft’s new Xbox‑focused, controller‑first “Xbox mode” today — without waiting for the retail 25H2 release — by enrolling in the Xbox Insider previews and switching on the compact/full‑screen Xbox UX in the...

Microsoft’s console-first pivot for small screens lands in a surprisingly usable form, and testing Windows 11’s new Handheld Gaming Mode on an OG ROG Ally shows both what’s changed and what still needs work for real-world handheld PC owners. Background / Overview Windows 11’s new Handheld Gaming...

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 7 arrives as a tidy, well-engineered Copilot+ laptop that clearly hits the brief for battery life, build quality, and on-device AI acceleration — yet the real-world experience described by some owners and reviewers exposes a stubborn seam between polished hardware and...

Google’s Chromium team is rolling out support for Windows 11’s Direct3D 12 (D3D12) video encoding path to Chrome and Microsoft Edge, a change that shifts real‑time video encoding for browser-based calls and screen sharing from the CPU to the GPU — promising smoother video, lower CPU utilization...

Create Custom Power Plans & Use powercfg to Improve Battery Life and Performance (Win10/11) Difficulty: Intermediate | Time Required: 20 minutes This guide walks you through creating tailored power plans and using the built-in powercfg command-line tool to tune battery life and performance on...

The MSI Claw 8 AI+ is one of the most impressive Windows-based handhelds to ship in recent memory — a machine that should have remade the market — and yet months after launch it remains stubbornly scarce, frequently priced above its intended MSRP, and trapped in the wider supply-and-tariff drama...

Apple’s latest move to push health sensors into earbuds — and iOS 26’s Workout Buddy — changes the rules for people who buy wearables primarily to track exercise, and it raises a direct question: do you still need an Apple Watch to close your rings and monitor workouts? Background / Overview...

Mashable’s recent roundup of the best Windows laptops for 2025 puts a stake in the ground: Windows machines are no longer playing catch‑up with Apple — in several key areas they’re leading the conversation on battery life, repairability, and flexible performance. The piece highlights seven...

The Surface Laptop 7 isn’t just Microsoft’s best Copilot+ PC to date — it is a clear, pragmatic challenge to Apple’s dominance in the thin-and-light space, delivering blistering multi-core performance, class-leading battery life under specific tests, and a premium aluminum build that finally...

ASUS’ quietly posted promo that details the Xbox Ally family’s so‑called “Zero Gravity” cooling system has pulled back the curtain on one of the most consequential engineering problems for modern handheld gaming PCs: how to keep a dense, hot APU comfortable and quiet in every orientation while...

Microsoft has quietly added a simple but consequential toggle in Microsoft Edge Dev that hands users explicit control over whether the browser’s Efficiency mode follows Windows 11’s system-level Energy Saver or stays enabled all the time—an integration that tightens the browser’s...

The Surface Laptop Studio 2 is Microsoft’s most aggressively positioned laptop in years: a heavy-duty, convertible Windows workstation built around 13th‑Gen Intel H‑series silicon, up to NVIDIA RTX 40‑series graphics and a dedicated Intel Movidius NPU — and Microsoft even used an on‑stage...

Apple’s MacBook Air M3 and LG’s Gram 17 top many recent “best battery life” lists, with business-focused machines such as the Dell XPS 15 and Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon also singled out for long‑running, dependable power — a roundup that Analytics Insight published as part of its “Best Laptops...

The compact 18‑key cordless numeric keypad — the retro, round‑keycap mini number pad sold under a variety of generic and small‑brand names — is an inexpensive, plug‑and‑play way to restore a dedicated number pad to a laptop or compact keyboard, but buyers should weigh real‑world ergonomics...

The Dell 14 Plus arrives not as a headline-stealer but as a steady, unimaginative workhorse: modestly priced, competent where it needs to be, and unapologetically conservative in every visible choice. For buyers whose priority is reliability over razzle-dazzle—IT fleets, students, knowledge...

If your Windows 11 laptop’s battery life feels shorter than it should, the usual advice—dim the screen, close background apps, choose a power‑efficient mode—helps, but it may not be the whole story; one often‑overlooked background system, the Windows Search Indexer, can silently chew CPU, disk...