Three to Four Hour Battery Life

[Roozbeh]

Are you using IE exclusively? I installed the intel drivers and had made those settings a long time ago.

Other than fiddling with the CPU parking what else is crucial?

I don't see red flag when I go through the reviews that would explain my three hour battery life. I have quit using chrome, I started up the canary and saw my discharge rate increase substantially.

Generally speaking what should the discharge rate range be?

I dont use IE. never been fan of IE. I use Canary and sometimes regular chrome. Canary has some of its own problems for me (like zooming with new Intel drivers).
Dont mess around with CPU parking. Just putting everything to maximize power did the trick for me. (you still have to do the registry trick to get them appear in battery settings).
Completely idle, your total discharge rate should be around -4, -5. (with lowest brightness I get -2.6).

----------------
I just tested now, watching a youtube movie discharge rate is around -9mw for me in desktop chrome (with 10 tabs open), around -6.5mw in IE. But lows are very low in IE. the lowest discharge rate I get in chrome (38.0.2125.101) was -7 just once but it gets to -5 in IE pretty often. So IE is really better!

If your rates are something other than these, you might need to mess around with some settings.

 

[hadrian]

Roozbeh, I had followed most of your suggestions before and my brightness was always 40% when unplugged. But I am floored you use chrome and get so many hours of battery life. So it can't be that chrome cuts battery life in half <removed personal attack>

Would you be so kind to give me a figure of your temps? Chrome runs the CPUs substantially hotter for me...I can do 37-45 degrees light browsing in IE while with Chrome I do 42-50 plugged in. Heavy browsing is a different story with temps all the way to 70 for chrome whereas in IE I haven't seen much more than 55

If my temps are off as well then I might be doing somethg else wrong. Thanks a lot for looking into this; you are very kind.

 

[jnjroach]

Roozbeh, I had followed most of your suggestions before and my brightness was always 40% when unplugged. But I am floored you use chrome and get so many hours of battery life. So it can't be that chrome cuts battery life in half

Would you be so kind to give me a figure of your temps? Chrome runs the CPUs substantially hotter for me...I can do 37-45 degrees light browsing in IE while with Chrome I do 42-50 plugged in. Heavy browsing is a different story with temps all the way to 70 for chrome whereas in IE I haven't seen much more than 55

If my temps are off as well then I might be doing somethg else wrong. Thanks a lot for looking into this; you are very kind.

Enough of the personal attacks.....it has been known that Chrome for Windows has had a bug that became public late this summer, but many of us noticed the behavior before the press went public with it....

http://www.maximumpc.com/google_chrome_draining_laptop_batteries_least_201

http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/18/5914975/google-chrome-windows-laptop-battery-drain-fix

Only recently has Google started to address this bug and many who are using older builds are still impacted by it. Also Win32 Applications will also impact your battery life, it is the nature of the code, Win32 Programing Priciples that most ISVs follow are geared towards performance and not for battery savings.

 

[GreyFox7]

Roozbeh, I had followed most of your suggestions before and my brightness was always 40% when unplugged. But I am floored you use chrome and get so many hours of battery life. So it can't be that chrome cuts battery life in half <removed personal attack>

Would you be so kind to give me a figure of your temps? Chrome runs the CPUs substantially hotter for me...I can do 37-45 degrees light browsing in IE while with Chrome I do 42-50 plugged in. Heavy browsing is a different story with temps all the way to 70 for chrome whereas in IE I haven't seen much more than 55

If my temps are off as well then I might be doing somethg else wrong. Thanks a lot for looking into this; you are very kind.

Pot meet Kettle.

 

[Roozbeh]

Its not clear to me what kind of test you want me to do. Normally my temps never ever get to 70.Maybe while playing games. I am also heavy browser user. But I mostly use mixture of canary and desktop chrome. If I hear the fan noise I usually find the tab responsible and kill it. In my experience lots of time my gmail tab gets busy for no reason (so I kill it) and second consumer is flash plugin.

Why don't you report some if your discharge rates? like idle, chrome, IE youtube watching (or whatever you do). So you know if something is wrong or not.
The problem with my SP3 is that I have changed lots of registry settings and configs which I really dont know how they come into the mix. But right now I am very pleased with my battery life.

One ugly solution is that you restrict your high CPU freq.
I use netgear PTV3000 for wireless display and I noticed playing a video full screen make battery drain to ~-28w because CPU was at full speed. I've lowered CPU freq to x12 and drain was -14 (or less) and no problem in next 2hrs of watching video! So I kind of reduced battery consumption into half. But I myself dont like this solution because whats the point of having paid ~$1100 to SP3 just to lower your CPU freq!

anyway...

Also "powercfg -energy" gives you an energy-report.html which has some good warnings (and also very important features in information section) if something is causing problem or for example if chrome changed your global timer ticks or not.

Actually If you are still unsatisfied you can test see if CPU parking helps you or not!Maybe your system doesn't go into deep idle modes and thus CPU parking would be beneficial for you!

 

[malberttoo]

BLAH BLAH BLAH

Enough of the personal attacks.....it has been known that Chrome for Windows has had a bug that became public late this summer, but many of us noticed the behavior before the press went public with it....

http://www.maximumpc.com/google_chrome_draining_laptop_batteries_least_201

http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/18/5914975/google-chrome-windows-laptop-battery-drain-fix

Only recently has Google started to address this bug and many who are using older builds are still impacted by it. Also Win32 Applications will also impact your battery life, it is the nature of the code, Win32 Programing Priciples that most ISVs follow are geared towards performance and not for battery savings.

Not that Jeff needs any help from me, he doesn't. But I'm not going to let it slide either! Check your facts before you think of maligning anyone here, let alone a veteran member. The Chrome power issue is well-documented, I was one of the first to report here that it did indeed hammer my battery life.

"Ignorance" is making a statement like yours, without, apparently, even bothering to hit the "search" function and verify the truth of something.