Maximize Dell XPS 15 Battery Life (9520)

Not long ago, I decided that I wanted to upgrade my mobile work experience with a laptop that better suited to the activities I wanted to use it for; primarily writing. After engaging in the arduous process of learning everything there was to know about the current laptop market, I landed on the XPS 15. It seemed to check all the boxes that I wanted, including rather pointless things like having as small a bezel as possible. There was just one caveat — the battery life was supposedly pretty bad. With a new process generation with the most recent models, I decided to gamble and go with it anyways.

Dell XPS 15–9520

After I got the XPS, it became obvious to me that there were some serious easy wins with this machine that would largely improve the battery life. I have been messing around with these settings for a couple of months and have now decided to share them with you so that you might get the most out of your XPS 15’s battery without making any massive compromises.

With just these two simple changes, I was getting around 9 to 10 active hours out of my XPS 15.

#1 Change the Resolution

Although it is very handy and desirable that the XPS 15 is capable of supporting multiple 4K displays in a docked setup, 4K is a ludicrously excessive resolution when using the XPS 15 as an actual laptop. My guess here is that if you shift down to 2560x1600, you wont realize much a difference.

For the most battery life you could go down to 1920 x 1200 but if you are like me and like that little bit extra fidelity, 2560 x 1600 is a sweet spot. What is nice about this is that Windows is pretty smart these days and if you do connect it to monitors, it remembers that setup and you should not have to be constantly change resolutions every time you take the XPS 15 on the move.

1. Press the “🪟” key
2. Type “Resolution”
3. You will see an option to “change your resolution” appear, select it.
4. Use the dropdown to select your preferred resolution (2560x1600, 1920x1200 recommended)

#2 Use Battery Saver Aggressively

Windows has this nifty feature called “Battery Saver” where it will stop doing a bunch of stuff in the background that is extra work for the battery but does not add a lot of value when you are unplugged. This includes things like checking for Windows updates and syncing OneDrive.

Generally this is setup to turn on after your battery falls below some certain threshold, say 20% but you can control this and I would encourage you to set it to either 50% or “Always”. Battery Saver only applies when your laptop is unplugged. When you snap back in the charging USB-C, it will automatically turn Battery Saver off regardless of the charge level.

Additionally, I would ensure that you are also letting Battery Save dim your screen when it turns on. You can override the screen brightness when you need to and it will not turn the rest of the Battery Saving features off. This is also true to other features like OneDrive syncing. If you need to sync something, you can just toggle sync back on for OneDrive as you need it without turning all the other features of Battery Saver off.

1. Press the “🪟” key
2. Type “battery saver”
3. An option will appear to “turn battery saver on or off”, select it.
4. Use the dropdown to select when Battery Saver will turn on (“Always” or “50%” recommended)
5. (Optional) Also click the switch to allow Battery Saver to dim your screen automatically

#3 (Optional) Try Using Edge

Which web browser you use always seems to be a fairly contentious topic, but in this instance I am not recommending it for any other reason that if you want to get the most out of your battery, Edge is just flat out the best choice here. I am sure we will see battery saving features in other browsers at some point but as I write this, it seems that Edge is the only browser that is any good at preserving battery out of the box.

Edge by default does a bunch of things when your laptop is unplugged, mostly to do with how it manages tabs you are not using but without you needing to do anything to make it happen. If you really care about battery and you have not given Edge a fair shake in a while, this is a good reason to do so.

1. Press the “🪟”
2. Type “Edge”
3. You should see an option for the Edge browser, select it
4. Edge will usually prompt you to make it the default browser if it is not already but I encourage you to try it out for a while before making it the default.