HP EliteBook x360 1030 G3 battery life well below announced?

[NickB12345]

Thanks - I found that page too.  But it was tricky to find an accurate power comparison of the M2 NVMe drives.

Tweakers in NL have one but all the lowest scores are Intel drives???

https://tweakers.net/categorie/674/solid-state-drives/producten/#filter:XYzLCsMgFET_ZdYhqKlK_IBAF1l1...

If the Hynix gets so hot like you experienced that does indeed suggest it is not so efficient. And I agree that HP are likely not selecting the highest spec components. The Samsung Evo 860 has good low power scores on Anandtech and is cheap so I might test that.

I have tried coming off Chrome before due to power usage buy always drift back to having 10-12 tabs open...so helpful for multi-tasking.

Throttlestop needed some missing DLL, I'll figure it out when I get some time.

I use BatteryBar pro to measure my battery life, but it can jump around greatly. I'm hoping that it will get better with experience but not great so far.

If I can get this laptop up to 8-9 hours based on your tips I will be so pleased. I really only upgraded from the G2 for more battery life.   

One interesting thing...I just started using a laptop lifter stand. See photo.  That holds the laptop up at an angle when on my lap, or at a desk etc.  It really was for better posture but I think it is improving battery life too, as the fan is running much less.

[Akraen]

Cool stand! I think if your fans are running that might indicate something isn't quite right with either power profiles, services stuck in a loop, or perhaps you have Turbo enabled in the BIOS on battery?

My fans are never on when on battery. It's strictly passive cooling. I am very hopeful that you can get Throttlestop going. I can hit 8 hours at max brightness, and it's generally cool to the touch unless I'm running my trading charts in full screen. Opera supports tabs, I have 10-20 tabs open at any given moment.

Funny thing is today firefox is draining my battery far more than usual, so I've closed it and things are back to normal. We can't blame HP for that, haha.

[NickB12345]

Thanks again Akraen.

Turboboost *was* on in BIOS, so I turned it off.

I now have Throttlestop running on the default Battery setting, and will see if that makes any improvement.

Can you confirm which tool you use to measure your battery time? Thanks!

[Akraen]

I use excel or a calculator and the powercfg /batteryreport log. I've yet to find a tool that can properly assess battery life. Even Windows can't figure it out sometimes. It'll go from, for example, 167 hours remaining to 15 hours remaining, to 35. The HP, when properly configured, does all sorts of wizadry with power states. I haven't figured it out, but that's just the limits of my knowledge. Maybe somebody else can explain it.

Anyway I just got in the habit of going straight to the horse's mouth and open up command prompt/powershell and typing powercfg/batteryreport then looking at the log. I add up all the times awake between charges and call that its battery life. This is the first device I've ever owned that can go a couple days untethered, or I can take with me on a weekend trip and not bring the charger. (its LTE is great and doesn't seem to impact battery life)

[NickB12345]

Hey Akraen

Could you post some images of your Throttlestop settings?  I'm pretty sure my battery life has dropped since I installed it 😞

[NickB12345]

Also I was able to pick up a cheap Samsung 250 GB 860 EVO M.2 drive to test. I'm dubious that it will save much power, to be truthful, but it scores very well on Anandtech and I'll be able to sell on the Hynix for close to what I paid. So nothing to lose 🙂

[NickB12345]

I stand corrected: this page indeed confirms that these NVMe SSDs can consume very different amounts of power https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/notebook-battery-life-storage,review-34161-3.html

[NickB12345]

After more reading I passed on the Samsung SSD swap out, and instead went for a Western Digital WD Black SN750.

This is a much newer drive than the Samsung and got good reviews from Anandtech - "the WD Black SN750 will be hitting the market most closely priced to the Samsung 970 EVO. In those conditions, the SN750 will be the obvious choice for laptop usage due to its great power efficiency".

I have noticed some minor battery improvement (using Battery Bar Pro), and while the 'time left' counter does seem to vary wildly, as mentioned above, the overall "full runtime" value (which is a statistical estimate, taken over multiple cycles) does seem to be creeping up. It was 7hr something but is now up to 8hr 20. I'm interested to see if this keeps going up.

All this has been without Throttlestop - as I wrote before, it seemed to make the situation worse. I'll try again.

[NickB12345]

Update;  with various changes I have been able to make my battery life 10 hours+, so very pleased. At 60% brightness, with 8 Chrome tabs open, the laptop will run for more than 12 hours  overnight before battery expires. Summary of changes;

- correct BIOS battery settings as described by Akraen

- have Windows Battery Saver activate under 95% capacity

- calibrate battery

- new WD SSD

- changing to a different AV program

- uninstalling all unnecessary programs

- turning off keyboard backlight

- Running Throttlestop automatically on startup, set to 4 (Battery saver) and copying the Huawei settings referenced above

I also dabbled with Opera browser but even the power saver mode of this seemed to have little improvement over Chrome, so switched back to that for ease. 

Performance is definitely slower than before but can resolved in a couple of click by switching Battery Saver off and closing Throttlestop. 

Thanks to Akraen for his post and the encouragement to experiment!