Sure, this probably sounds obvious, but if you’re worried about power draw, the first thing to do is just open the control panel and change your power settings. With Windows power plans, it’s really easy to let the computer itself determine how to optimally use power based on what you’re doing. Generally, you’ll have three options: balanced, power saver, and high performance. Balanced is usually the default and tries to alter power usage based on what the computer currently needs.

HIgh performance should be avoided if you want to save power, as this plan prevents your CPU from downclocking even when its idle, forcing it to draw more power even when it doesn’t need it. Power saver is naturally the one you want to go for, as this one cuts back on a lot of unnecessary background tasks, and underclocks your CPU when it isn’t needed. Granted, if you use your PC to do intensive stuff sometimes, you may want to just go for the balanced plan, so it’ll ramp up when it needs to.

Even when your computer is fairly idle, there is usually a whole lot going on under the hood: dozens of processes that you never see unless you open up the task manager and take a look. The thing is, not all of these processes are actually needed, and you can safely disable a lot of them to cut back on how much your computer is doing, and by extension, how much power it needs.

While you have to be careful about what processes you terminate, there are usually several tied to old apps you installed that you may not even use anymore. Some classic examples of power leeches are printer apps that stay online even when there’s no printer connected, or a background process that is constantly refreshing to see if there is a new update for a relevant app. You rarely need to have these things on all the time.

That said, be careful with what you terminate. Some background processes are vital to computer function, and terminating them could cause instability or an outright crash. If you aren’t sure what the process does, you should probably just leave it alone. Ignoring Microsoft processes is usually a pretty good idea too. But if you know for certain that you don’t need a particular background process, you can disable it.

If you don’t know how to get to your task manager to do all of this, there are several methods you can try.

Whenever you boot up your PC, it starts a bunch of programs right away. Some of these are pretty useful. Others don’t really need to come up every single time you turn the device on. It may not seem like much, but if you have a lot of startup programs when you boot, they can increase your power draw by quite a lot, eating up CPU cycles before you’re even actually doing anything on the computer yourself.

Some common examples of apps that tend to start up on every single boot are Steam and Discord. While I personally use both of these pretty often, I don’t actually need them every time I’m on my PC, so they are definitely wasting power by starting up on every boot. Other common culprits are chat apps, game launchers, and software update apps, among many others.

If you want to see what you have slated for startup, just open your task manager and head on over to the “startup” tab. You won’t be able to tell exactly how much power any startup app is taking, but Windows does tell you how much impact the apps will have on your boot time: chances are, the bigger the impact on boot time, the more power these apps take to start. Go ahead and disable everything that you don’t need.

While we’re on the subject, this goes for just leaving apps running in the background, too. If you don’t need something open, just close it. It only takes a few seconds to open it again when you actually need it, so it’s hardly a big inconvenience.

Make Your Sleep and Screen Saver Timers as Low as you can tolerate

Without a doubt, one of the biggest power draws for your computer is, well, having it on. That’s all well and good when you’re actually using it, but what about all those breaks you take from it? Even walking away from your computer for 15 minutes is 15 minutes of power you didn’t need to waste. Some people actually leave their monitors on all day long, even when they aren’t at their device.

It may not seem like a big deal, but monitors can be pretty power hungry. If you have something real nice like a high-refresh rate or 4K monitor, you better believe it takes a lot of power to keep that display on. Whether you’re a business owner with a lot of devices or just a penny-pincher at home, setting up short timers for both screen savers and sleep mode on your devices can ultimately save a lot of power over time.

Of course, no one wants to turn their screen back on because they looked away for thirty seconds, but ten minutes or so isn’t really unreasonable.

Driving a fuel-guzzling super car instead of your usual commute car to the grocery store just to buy some food would not be very efficient, would it? Similarly, it’s totally possible to put way more performance into your computer than it actually needs to do what you want it to do. If you’re building your own PC, it’s really tempting to buy the biggest, baddest hardware your budget can afford. After all, more is more, right? Why settle for less if you can get more?

Well, powerful hardware usually needs a lot of power even when it’s not operating at max capacity. And while it sounds tempting to get a super powerful CPU and GPU, if you don’t do anything on your PC that actually needs that power, you’re just burning money that you didn’t have to. Even if you play a lot of games on your PC, look at the type of games you play, and whether or not they need the top-of-the-line hardware to run well. You may be able to get the results you want even with a cheap GPU.

Undervolting is a process in which you reduce the voltage supplied to your CPU or GPU by default. Doing this can cut back on how much power these components use and how much heat they generate without necessarily losing performance, since manufacturer’s often have the default voltage higher than these components actually need by default. This can actually increase your performance when doing intensive things like gaming.

That aside, obviously, lowering the supplied voltage to these components lowers the total amount of power the PC is using. Even undervolting by as little as 1-2% can have some pretty massive overall power savings in the long run. All of this said, undervolting your stuff is a little complicated and requires a lot of trial and error. You have to be careful, because you could make your system unstable if you do too much.

Don’t worry though, we’ve covered the process of undervolting your CPU or GPU elsewhere, and with a bit of practice, it’s not too hard to get the hang of. But if you’re not comfortable with it, this is a step you could avoid.

This is less about saving power for your computer and more about just saving power in general. Much like the super car analogy used earlier, there are some tasks that your PC might just be overqualified for, especially if you’ve built a really powerful machine. If you have a gaming PC you have built to run the newest games on the highest graphics, why waste all of that power to browse the web or type on a Word document?

Saving power probably doesn’t seem like an important thing to most people. A lot of us never think about the electricity we are using. But there are plenty of reasons to care: being a little friendlier to the environment, lowering your electric bill in any way you can, or increasing PC performance by toning back heat generation are all valid reasons to use any method you can to lower energy consumption. Each of these small things may seem negligible at first, but like all small things, they add up over time when they’re done consistently.