Windows 10 power saver? Does it work?

[basedthirst]

Is it worth turning on? Will it actually make a difference in battery life and how much will it affect normal performance?

[Zando_]

I think it just lowers the brightness and disables background apps and such. IDK how much it effects battery life though. 

[basedthirst]

48 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

I think it just lowers the brightness and disables background apps and such. IDK how much it effects battery life though. 

Hell I'll probably just leave it on then 

[Zando_]

Just now, basedthirst said:

Hell I'll probably just leave it on then 

Yeah, if you notice slowdowns in games or other intensive programs, it only takes 5 seconds to turn it off. 

[GoodBytes]

1 hour ago, basedthirst said:

Is it worth turning on? Will it actually make a difference in battery life and how much will it affect normal performance?

To be clear, you have Power Saver power plan and you have Battery Saver under Windows 10 (assuming your not a Windows Insider, as that changed).

 

The power plans (High performance, Balance, Power Saver) are in the path to be discontinued. What the plans do is what they are defined to do under the advanced panel, which is mostly reduce screen brightness, limit CPU clock, and limit other things. It doesn't stop services and tasks.

 

Battery Saver limits background programs, stops live tiles from working, stop indexing, and a few other things, and reduce screen brightness.

 

In the Fall Creator Update coming in Sept/Oct of this year (expected), you have this:

 

Where, depending on the slider position will even even disable transparency effect and other effect, including system performance and be more useful.

 

What's the ideal settings on a desktop system or mobile system plugged in: Balance (or mid option in the slider panel pictured above).

Balance allows power saving features to kick in, but give you all the performance you need. High Performance, disables power saving features, creating more system heat and noise. This in turn, for mobile systems, "disables" Turbo boost, as the CPU is too hot for the CPU to be able to clock faster.. I guess maybe if you laptop has a beefy cooling solution it might affect you less, where it will still be able to turbo boost but for less time. On a desktop, it is not a problem, but you are consuming power for nothing, an d your system makes more noise due to the additional heat produced.