What are the best ways to extend a laptop’s battery life?

Create a dedicated power plan in your OS settings that aggressively limits power consumption when unplugged. This gives you fine-grained control over how every component behaves on battery.

Lower your screen brightness to the minimum comfortable level and turn off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and keyboard backlighting when not in use. These are the largest passive power drains on any laptop.

When running on battery, stick to lightweight tasks like document editing, web browsing with limited tabs, and reading. Avoid video editing, 3D rendering, gaming, and streaming high-resolution video, all of which heavily tax the CPU and GPU.