Energy Star X

Most of us probably know how frustrating dealing with bad battery life can be, and Windows laptops aren't exactly known for their efficiency, leading to most Windows consumer laptops to be largely deficient when it comes to battery life. If you're not one who permanently keeps their laptop plugged in, it's worth looking out for solutions to ameliorate some of that bad battery life.

That's what Energy Star X seeks to do: per its name, this one was designed to help users achieve better battery life on their devices — especially those with Windows 11 and the latest processors.

A lot about battery management boils down to knowing when to throttle, and when to boost certain processes. Dynamically adjusting which processes get boosted helps the user benefit from their device's performance, while dialing down unused programs in the background makes the throttling nearly unnoticeable to the end user, while not affecting the overall functioning of the system. That is, at least in theory, what battery management mostly entails.

In practice, perusing the logs of this tool displays such behavior. Processes will get throttled and boosted based on your current use case, as the program looks to adapt and dynamically adjust the priority of certain running programs.

Testing battery life can be a long and arduous process, and the variables when it comes to using a Windows device are a great many. Applying the tool increased our battery life estimates in the Battery window, but only by about a dozen minutes.

The developer claims the program works best on the latest version of Windows 11, on devices outfitted with the latest processors from Intel and AMD. While our system did meet these criteria, it's still debatable whether such a tool was truly effective.

If you're experiencing bad battery life on your device, you can try out Energy Star X, and see how it does on your machine. However, if your battery is not quite up to the task, there's only so much that battery management software can do.