Battery Life - HP ENVY 13-aq1005na

[NickZen]

Hi there everyone, I just purchased the HP ENVY 13-aq1005na,  £1,199 model with 16gb RAM, 10th gen i7 Processor and 1TB SSD drive. Just wanted to ask about the battery life?

It was advertised as being up to 20 hours (18 hours, 15 minutes video playback) and whilst I never expected to get near those numbers I did expect to get at least 9/10 hours battery life.

From my experience so far, I seem to be getting between 5-7 hours mixed use but the battery does seem to drop much faster when using Zoom or playing videos on Youtube etc, to the point where I reckon with constant video playback I'd probably be looking at more like 3-4 hours max.

Just wanted to see if anyone else has had similar battery performance with this version of the Envy 13 and if there is anything I can do to maximise/improve the battery life? I LOVE the laptop in general but I just want maximum battery life!

Thanks All!

[NickZen]

Hi all, please can anyone help me with some advice on this? 

Thanks!

[envyguy123]

Yeah, i'm having the same issues.  Had my laptop a week now (exact same model as you), and also getting poor battery life.  Other niggles for me are long charging times (3 hours or more) and it runs hot and loud when plugged in (doesn't seem to be a way to stop the fans going mental when it's plugged in which is annoying).

I wouldnt mind 3-4 hours charging if I got 10-12 hours battery life which is what I expected based on reviews and halving the flimsy marketing bumph, but 5 hours is not what i expected at all.

Pretty annoyed really and trying different things, but no success yet 😞

[envyguy123]

I think I've worked it out.  It's the Nvidia GPU (likely drivers) that is always on.  Optimus should switch the GPU off when not in use, but it doesn't seem to be working for me.  Explains the battery drain as well as the constant overheating and fan noise I was getting when plugged in - might also be what's causing your battery problems.

I disabled the mx250 in device manager and my battery life has almost doubled.  Not exactly a permanent solution to the problem, but at least I now know where the problem is.

I'm not sure if it's because I updated to the latest Nvidia drivers direct from them instead of keepin the old ones from HP, or if the latest drivers are broken at the moment for this card, but it's a start.  Might try to remove the drivers with DDU and reinstall the old HP ones and see if that fixes it.  If not, i'll just manually enable and disable the mx250 which is fine for me because I only really need the mx250 to play civ etc, and don't need it for general use or lighter games (football manager, factorio etc). A bit of a faff, but better than awful battery life and pointless overheating when idle.

Since disabling the mx250 last night, i gave the laptop a full charge overnight and took it off the power.  Today i've been working on the laptop on battery since 9.30am this morning, and it's sitting at 45% remaining at 2.15pm, so looks like i should get about 8 or 9 hours out of it  which seems about right .

For reference, I've been working from home through it (citrix, so thin client but wifi working solidly all day), music playing at 50% volume, screen on max brightness because of the sun, using a bluetooth mouse, also spent an hour watching a video (using vlc) over lunch etc so it's not been idle, but not exactly taxed either.

Hope this helps