Ashville NC IT Support Company | Blue Ridge Technology, Inc.

Coming Soon in Windows 11: Efficiency Mode

A longer lasting battery with Efficiency mode
Does your workforce rely on laptops or tablets running Windows? If so, battery life can be a persistent concern. Everything’s fine when your team members are working at their primary desk and connected to power, but short battery life can create headaches and even lost work in other situations. And what about resource efficiency? Do your team’s laptops and Windows tablets seem to struggle under the weight of everything you need them to do? Or do they feel surprisingly sluggish compared to just a few years ago? Sometimes the answer to problems like these is that you need to upgrade older devices. Batteries don’t last forever, and older machines lack the power of newer ones. But what if you could get more out of your current devices—without needing to replace them just yet? That’s what the latest upcoming feature in Windows 11 promises to do. Here’s everything you need to know about a Efficiency Mode, a feature likely coming to Windows 11 in the coming months.

Windows 11’s Efficiency Mode Explained

The team behind Windows 11 is currently testing a new feature, called Efficiency Mode. This is different from older features like Power Saver, which throttle performance across the board, and it has the potential to extend the life of your equipment (and batteries). Here’s how it works. Efficiency Mode gives users the ability to toggle the efficiency of individual apps and change that toggle at any time. Say you’ve got a Google Chrome window open with 8 tabs, all loading various sites and web apps. You aren’t using any of them at the moment, but you know you need to be able to switch back at a moment’s notice. Chrome is notorious for eating up system resources — and when you’re using it actively, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. But when your Chrome window is just running in the background, there’s no reason it should be the primary resource drain on your device. When Efficiency Mode arrives on Windows 11 devices, users will be able to toggle an app like Chrome into Efficiency Mode. That will essentially deprioritize Chrome, pushing it to the background and freeing up resources for the other apps you’re using. Doing this is better than closing Chrome entirely and losing your place on all those tabs. And when you need Chrome to perform better, you can always toggle it out of Efficiency Mode. Now extend this concept across each and every app your team members use, from Outlook to Photoshop to industry-specific utilities— each one can now be controlled individually, without the need to kill resource-intensive apps to gain those resources back.

Why Efficiency Mode Matters

Did you know that many laptops (with Power Save or similar settings enabled) actually underperform when running on battery power? Device makers know that if they let those laptops run at full speed, they’ll drain their batteries in record time. So they throttle them down, saving battery life but hurting performance at the same time. So your device might already be less powerful when in battery mode — meaning it will struggle even more to balance the needs of multiple heavy-duty apps. Efficiency Mode will give savvy users more control over their laptops’ performance, which is always a good thing. Used effectively, this new mode will give users more time on battery and could even extend overall battery life.

Slow Devices? Degrading Battery Life? We Can Help.

If your business is plagued by slow devices or degrading battery life, Efficiency Mode might help when it comes later this year. But long term, you may need a more comprehensive hardware strategy, one that replaces users’ hardware before it becomes a problem, not after. The team here at Bluewater can help you with this — and any other IT needs you may have. Reach out today to get the help you need!