Tracking Battery Life

[leeshor]

I have a lot of items disabled. One day I need to make a list. Feedback disabled, background Edge disabled, nothing syncing unless I ask. Only one live tile, very little in OneDrive, pretty much anything related to phones turned off, not sharing updates, use Firefox with ad-ons like Adblock Plus. There are so many settings!

It's a real pain when I set up a desktop because all the things that don't apply are turned on by default. Even though the desktops don't use battery it seems a tad snappier with those portable settings turned off but it takes 15-20 minutes to go through them all.

 

[Yillbs]

I have a lot of items disabled. One day I need to make a list. Feedback disabled, background Edge disabled, nothing syncing unless I ask. Only one live tile, very little in OneDrive, pretty much anything related to phones turned off, not sharing updates, use Firefox with ad-ons like Adblock Plus. There are so many settings!

It's a real pain when I set up a desktop because all the things that don't apply are turned on by default. Even though the desktops don't use battery it seems a tad snappier with those portable settings turned off but it takes 15-20 minutes to go through them all.

Yes, if you are actually getting 5 - 7 hours of usage then please, make a list, but not just a list, a place to find those settings you disabled
Also, when you run your battery report, what does your capacity say ? I have two SP4's, one says 41 the other says 37, that's about 4k difference, which ends up being about 30-45 minutes of real life usage.

 

[Philtastic]

5 hours minimum Please, share the secret with me

Assuming that you don't have a hardware issue, the secret is to just use it as is. Another secret is to not install and run a bunch of things that tend to remain active in the background. I do not use any special tweaks and my average battery life (which includes many times where I played games or did something intense that would drain the battery in 1-2 hours) is 6 hours.

 

[leeshor]

Yes, if you are actually getting 5 - 7 hours of usage then please, make a list, but not just a list, a place to find those settings you disabled
Also, when you run your battery report, what does your capacity say ? I have two SP4's, one says 41 the other says 37, that's about 4k difference, which ends up being about 30-45 minutes of real life usage.

I'll make a list if and when I can. 2 things I neglected to mention. Most of the time I operate at about 35% brightness with autobright always off. I also use a blue tooth mouse and if I didn't, would probably add some to the battery life.

 

[MaxBuck]

I have an i7, 16GB RAM, and after 8 hours of hibernation (unplugged) I have 0% battery power loss. Very pleased. Thanks to leeshor and others who have posted battery conservation techniques.

I also typically operate my machine on AC power; only take it off when traveling out of the office.

 

[jnjroach]

Yesterday I was at a customer site's for meetings all day (flew in on Sunday and left Monday night after the meeting). I went on battery at 6:30 AM and at 2:30 PM I plugged in as I was at 14%, This was with:

• 2 sessions running 4 tabs each in Edge (On session using in Private as I needed to use another set of accounts for the demo) - Pages included the Azure Portal, O365 Portal
• OneNote Mobile (started with OneNote 2016 to setup up the meeting notes from Outlook and Skype for Business then switched to that page in the Mobile Version)
• Outlook 2016
• Excel 2016
• Drawboard PDF (Using for Documentation)
• Skype for Business (on the conference call - but not using audio as that was shared but shared my screen)

This is using the latest build of Redstone and Default Power Management Settings, this was mostly continuous use (only about 20 minutes throughout the session was in Connected Standby and only 2-5 minute intervals)

 

[shan109]

I have i7/8gb/256gb.

I think Windows Defender is the culprit in draining the battery life.

After turning off completely windows defender, I am running 7-7.5 hours with normal tasks such as web browsing, watching youtube, editing word/excel documents, photoshop, and watching full hd animes...

Before I turned it off, my battery life was only about 3.5-4 hours per full charge which is very very frustrating.

Quite satisfied with its performance now.

 

[Yillbs]

I have i7/8gb/256gb.

I think Windows Defender is the culprit in draining the battery life.

After turning off completely windows defender, I am running 7-7.5 hours with normal tasks such as web browsing, watching youtube, editing word/excel documents, photoshop, and watching full hd animes...

Before I turned it off, my battery life was only about 3.5-4 hours per full charge which is very very frustrating.

Quite satisfied with its performance now.

You're getting almost 8 hours of usage out of your 40~ watt hour battery and all you did was turn off windows defender ? What's your average screen brightness on ?

Also, how do you manage the live tile settings ? I can't seem to find it anywhere

 

[shan109]

You're getting almost 8 hours of usage out of your 40~ watt hour battery and all you did was turn off windows defender ? What's your average screen brightness on ?

Also, how do you manage the live tile settings ? I can't seem to find it anywhere

Yes... This time, even the fan does not turn on at all with multiple tabs open in firefox.
My brightness setting is "Darker."

Before, Windows Defender, especially the "Antimalware Service Executable Process" consistently by itself eats 60-90% of CPU in the task manager.

Now my total CPU usage is always 6-15% when I am using programs. During startup of programs such as office programs, the usage increase to abour 30-40% but after a few seconds of loading, it immediately decreases back to 6-15%.

By the way, in Photoshop, make sure you turn off the "Adobe CEP HTML Engine" which also eats a lot of CPU (about 60%) even without practically using it.

Anyway, my advise it that during actual usage, monitor the processes which eat a lot of CPU in the task manager, and disable those if they don't affect/are not necessary in performance of the program you are using.

 

[kmthang]

Yes... This time, even the fan does not turn on at all with multiple tabs open in firefox.
My brightness setting is "Darker."

Before, Windows Defender, especially the "Antimalware Service Executable Process" consistently by itself eats 60-90% of CPU in the task manager.

Now my total CPU usage is always 6-15% when I am using programs. During startup of programs such as office programs, the usage increase to abour 30-40% but after a few seconds of loading, it immediately decreases back to 6-15%.

By the way, in Photoshop, make sure you turn off the "Adobe CEP HTML Engine" which also eats a lot of CPU (about 60%) even without practically using it.

Anyway, my advise it that during actual usage, monitor the processes which eat a lot of CPU in the task manager, and disable those if they don't affect/are not necessary in performance of the program you are using.

So you're running without any protection? What browser do you use? Do you have any pinned tabs, roughly how many extensions on it?

 

[shan109]

So you're running without any protection? What browser do you use? Do you have any pinned tabs, roughly how many extensions on it?

Yes, I do not have any antivirus software installed. My only "protection" is creating Restore Point before installing a new "unsecured" program and using adblock plus in Mozilla Firefox with all protections on. I install a lot of add-ons (especially VPN/tunneling tools/dictionary tools) in it too. And yes I have pinned tabs such as facebook and gmail.

 

[Yillbs]

This is an interesting thread. I just got an SP4 with a lot number of 1604, and it seems to be night and day better than my previous one, I got 3 hours today.