Battery, USB and FAN

[techniker]

I'm on the latest BIOS version now 1.41 but these problems have been happening since the last 2 or 3 versions. Since then, Windows has also updated a number of times and behavior has changed over time so it's hard to tell whether it's the BIOS or OS that is causing the issues.

1.) Battery life is horrible, worse than before. I've never had "issues" with the battery before except for a few hiccups. The battery life was NEVER what HP advertised it would be even when it was new out of the box. Shame on you HP.

2.) USB Hub for the USB ports gets unplugged from the system randomly when running on battery power. This never used to happen. I only have a small USB dongle connected for my mouse. Every time I'm using the laptop while on battery, the USB ports randomly stop working for a little while (windows device disconnection sounds is heard) and then reconnected as if the BIOS or Windows is powering off the ports and then back on. This is really annoying and could cause data loss if I had an external storage device in use!

3.) Both fans go to full speed randomly and won't stop even after a reboot. This happens when the system is under NO load. I check CPU usage and it's sitting idle. I have to power down the laptop and boot back up to get it to stop. This is super annoying.

So is this HP and their BIOS updates or is this MS Windows 10 trying to control my hardware and doing a horrible job at it?

[techniker]

After digging in the BIOS and changing the setting for the battery from "Let HP manage battery" to "Maximum Battery" the battery charges to 100% and the USB ports don't disconnect/reconnect when unplugging the power cable. I even set the battery setting in Windows to "Best battery life" and the USB ports are fine so it looks like it's the setting in the BIOS that was causing the issue. I'm not sure about the FAN yet, too early to tell if the battery setting in the BIOS affects the fan as well.

Battery life on best battery setting in Windows and 100% charged shows less than 3 hours of run-time. That's horrible.

FYI. I have to use the BIOS setting to only use discreet graphics (onboard nVidia Quadro) and not the Intel GPU or Auto or Hybrid setting because any setting other than Discreet causes some applications to go blank white with no way of recovering the application. I've lost lots of work due to this and the only way to prevent it from happening is to use the discreet setting which I'm sure uses more power than using the Intel GPU.