My battery experiment

[leeshor]

This will require at least some explanation:

Started with 3 hours of charging before turning my SP4 on for the first time. While on the changer did 2 updates from Microsoft, turned off all but one live tile, uninstalled some stock apps, (don't ask me which ones as I didn't make notes), connected to WiFi, Installed Firefox, turned off the settings to keep WiFi on during sleep and did some research. All on a local account.

On battery since yesterday, installed a mail client, sleep quite a few times by closing the lid. Signed into my Microsoft account, updated 16 store apps, 2 more Microsoft updates, the last only being a Defender update, did more research, using Firefox, made notification and privacy adjustments, (quite a few as I've been through every setting at least 3 times, mostly because a few changed when I went from a local account to the Microsoft account). Since being on battery I have briefly launched Edge twice but I disabled it and a few other things in the background tasks section of settings. Downloaded and installed Macrium Reflect, did some deep disk cleaning and restarted 4 or 5 times. @GreyFox7 unfortunately, (or fortunately) I haven't done anything with Cortana (yet).

I'll let you see a photo of my current battery stats and you can decide if what I have done was a benefit. I said at one point I thought I would get 7 hours from a charge, Apparently I was wrong. This is off my first and only charge to this point and it has been on battery since yesterday.

 

[GreyFox7]

I used the search to find Word Pad and a couple of other local programs because I couldn't find them in the scrolling app list.

 

[leeshor]

That's very strange. I had to do the same for Notepad. Must be missing something. They're probably hiding in plain sight but my eyes aren't so good.

 

[MrGelato]

Good info! Thanks!

 

[Philtastic]

So how long has it been actively on? You don't make that very clear. And the estimate that they give for expected time remaining is very sensitive to what's currently going on in like the past minute and can change very very quickly. For example, in the time that it took me to write this post, my battery time left estimate went from 3.2 hours to 2.5 hours while the actual percent remained at 38%. And as I reach the end of this post, it's back up to 3.2 hours. And now, half a minute later, it's back down to 2.5 hours and the battery percent dropped to 37%.

Edit: And now 2 minutes later, it estimates 5 hours remaining at 37%. Seems like the estimate is garbage.
Edit2: Intel driver crashed while writing that first edit. 36%, 1.5 hours remaining.

 

[GreyFox7]

Yeah that Battery estimate algorithm needs a little smoothing over a longer time vs the short time it's using now.

I managed to eek out 8 hours however, I don't know if I could run with those settings
battery saver on all the time (which doesn't really do much it seems), Display brightness 30%, Cortana *sorta* off (seems to still be active even though I turned her off). Trying 35% screen brightness now.

Id go with 7ish as the time for my normal Web Browsing. YMMV.
Id rather this was 9ish. Hello Microsoft, this is a customer request.
It's probably all disabled but I might try to tweak some Power/Processor Throttling to eek out 9.

Cortana may be getting awarded some time from something else... seems to tie into the desktop search ... possibly indexing.

 

[leeshor]

So how long has it been actively on? You don't make that very clear. And the estimate that they give for expected time remaining is very sensitive to what's currently going on in like the past minute and can change very very quickly. For example, in the time that it took me to write this post, my battery time left estimate went from 3.2 hours to 2.5 hours while the actual percent remained at 38%. And as I reach the end of this post, it's back up to 3.2 hours. And now, half a minute later, it's back down to 2.5 hours and the battery percent dropped to 37%.

Edit: And now 2 minutes later, it estimates 5 hours remaining at 37%. Seems like the estimate is garbage.
Edit2: Intel driver crashed while writing that first edit. 36%, 1.5 hours remaining.

Good point, but when sleeping the battery use has been negligible. It appears, from looking at the battery stats and my actual usage that I could expect around 9 hours of actual use. During that time it was rarely idle if it wasn't sleeping. My hands on at the point that I took that picture had been at least 6 hours. When I'm on the Internet with Firefox it sips battery. I should also add that I have a blue tooth mouse connected and my WiFi Internet speed is the same as I get on my desktops.

 

[leeshor]

Here is the important part of the battery report. The 6:21:32 time is when it said I still had over 3 hours remaining. All on battery.

 

[GreyFox7]

So far today 5:20 with 50% used/remaining.

 

[leeshor]

Looks good to me!

It looks like I'll get 7-9 hours on my second battery run too. Browsing, Macrium backup and recovery image creation, installed more stuff including CCleaner, various battery studies. Mostly on the Internet, more research. Also 2 short LogMeIn sessions.

 

[GreyFox7]

How's your battery looking?

 

[leeshor]

If you're asking me, pretty darned good. The least battery run I've had was 5 hours but I'm mostly averaging 8.