Configure a custom power plan for battery use

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.

Steps

1. Open power settings (Windows: Control Panel > Power Options; macOS: System Settings > Battery; Linux: power-profiles-daemon or TLP)
2. Create or select a power-saving plan for battery use
3. Set the display to turn off after 2-3 minutes of inactivity
4. Set sleep after 5-10 minutes of inactivity
5. Reduce maximum processor state to 70-80% on battery (Windows advanced power settings)
6. Enable USB selective suspend and hard disk sleep

Tips

• On Windows, powercfg /batteryreport generates a detailed battery health report from the command line
• macOS manages processor throttling automatically in Low Power Mode
• Avoid setting processor limits too low or the system will feel sluggish