How you can lower your carbon footprint with Windows 11 and energy recommendations 💚
- Amanda Sterner
- 5 hours ago
- 4 min read
Hi welcome to my series on how to start loving Windows 11 now that it's time for Windows 10 to say bye 👋🏻. Until 14th of October I will explore Windows 11 features and functionality 💗.
In the eight blog post in my series on how to fall in love with Windows 11 I just want to help you save the world 😇🌍. And how can you help save the world? By lowering your carbon footprint of course. Let Windows 11 help you with the energy recommendations to make sure you use your computer in an efficient way. Lets reduce your carbon footprint!
Why does it matter
But why is it important to care about lowering your carbon footprint? Let's face it we are all on this earth together and how we live today will shape the future for our children and upcoming generations. By making conscious choices we can make sure the earth is a pleasurable place to stay 💚.
There are several different ways we can improve our carbon footprint, one of them being how to use our laptops. Of course, this is just a small piece of the carbon footprint cake and most of the carbon footprint when it comes to our computers actually comes from manufacturing laptops. But besides not changing your computer or phone yearly there are small things we can do.
How can you lower your carbon footprint with Windows 11?
You reach the carbon footprint settings by navigating to Setting > System > Power & battery > Energy recommendations.
There you will find a bunch of different settings. Some of them will probably already be turned on and some of them you will have the possibility to easily click the apply button. If you want to go wild you can click apply all in the top. Microsoft are really good at creating a little gamification vibe by showing you a percentage on how green you are (I feel guilty because I'll never reach 100% 😆).
When you click apply on any of the settings they just apply, if you want to change it back afterwards you can click the title of the setting, and you will navigate to the correct sections in the settings to change it back.
The different settings
Let's take a look at different possibilities we have today from top to bottom:
Set the power mode for best energy efficiency: This makes sure that the power and battery is being utilized in an efficient and good way on your laptop.
Turn on Dark mode: Did you know that dark mode is actually more environmentally friendly because it uses less light on your screen. This is one of those settings I just cannot handle, I'm a bright girl 💅🏻😇.
Set the screen brightness for best energy efficiency: Let your screen brightness be adjusted after Microsoft's recommendations.
Put my device to sleep after three minutes: With this setting your device will go to sleep after 3 minutes of inactivity. This is just too little time for me who enjoys staring into the void and think haha.
Turn off my screen after 3 minutes: Similar to the setting about putting your device to sleep but a little smoother option if you still want to make sure your computer isn't using more power than needed.
Turn off HDR to conserve energy: Since I use my work laptop for work the standard recommended settings for the screen are sufficient for me. If you are using your laptop, for example watching high quality videos or gaming maybe this is something that you need to think about.
Save power by optimizing screen contrast and brightness for the content shown: Make sure that whatever you're doing on the screen is being utilized with the best kind of settings, some activities require more contrast and brightness others less.
Change brightness automatically when lightning around me changes: This is a good and flexible setting making sure that the screen has different brightness dependent on if you're in a light place or in a dark place.
Turn on dynamic refresh rate to conserve energy: Let your computer decide the screen refresh rate. Like I said, I'm using my laptop for work meaning that I don't use it for high quality video or gaming. This means I don't need my screen to refresh at a very high pace, using this dynamic setting makes it easy for my laptop to adjust.
Turn off my screen saver: Well nobody needs a screen saver even though I really often miss that Windows 98 cool maze if you remember that one 😆.
Stop USB devices when my screen is off to help save battery: Yeah, you don't need those USB devices have a connection to your device when you aren't using your device.
There are a few mor ways to make sure you are doing your best energy wise, here you can read more about choosing energy efficient sleep settings: Power settings in Windows 11 - Microsoft Support.
My thoughts
Some settings you will really like, some you will get used to and some you probably don't want to get used. But I think that this is just a very great way to get started and get you thinking about how different settings can help you lower your carbon footprint. I'm pretty pleased with my 80% and maybe one day I'll finally cave in and start using dark mode 🖤.
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Others posts in my Windows 11 series:
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