Battery life? In use and long term question

[tlise]

Hiya. So I bought the laptop early December but didn't actually start using it until after Christmas as it was a gift.

The battery life is shocking. Like it was on full and now down to 93% and I have only been online a few minutes. Its brilliant if I get 2 hours out of it. Different to the 4-6 hours it supposedly had. It didn't even take as long as it should have to run down for callibration. 

I have had to callibrate it 3 times already. (Never had to do that once with previous laptop)

This time I had a look at the stats and it says that the battery is down to capacity of being 94% which is awful surely for the age of the laptop?

Its passed the checks so it must be working ok but surely it shouldn't be that low yet?

Stats if needed

There is a lot to be said for having the old style seperate battery where you could just replace without taking a laptop to pieces. And they lasted a lot longer. I also didn't need to plug it in so much at the beginning. 

[BeemerBiker]

;Make sure it is not running in turbo all the time. 

Enter the phrase 'edit power plan' in the window search box
Then select the 'Advanced' tab

Change the 100 to something lower.  %99 will keep it out of turbo but you might want to use a lower setting when on battery only.

Laptops have more power options than desktops.
There are battery reports and usage graphcs.
You can defined what happens when you close the lid.
The power button can be used to cause the system to sleep
or the sleep button can cause hibernation. Here is a typical plan

This image shows a laptop that is sleeping and unplugged. The user thought it had been turned off. Note that it discharges until it hits a critical value and then hibernates. About noon it was plugged in and started charging. if it was actually shutoff at about 7pm it would have kept it entire charge.

[tlise]

Thank you for your answer. 

I moved the bottom one down to 95% will that be enough? A thick question, what does that actually do as it says processor?

I have my own power plans (Not used a desktop for at least 10 years) so brightness etc is already down. And I never leave it on sleep. If I am not using it, I close it down (power option and shut down) so it shouldn't be using anything then. Its only actually on when I am using it. 

If I am just browsing it last the longest time (no more than 2 hours tho, I am down to 80% since I wrote the post) If I run a screen recording programme and play a game it goes even quicker. I have never tested watching netflix etc as they aren't what I do on laptop. But the old hp laptop I had, had about 8 hours initially and even if I did all that, I had mostly 4-5 hours. The rest of it was slower than a dead tortoise though so I would rather have this one 😁

[BeemerBiker]

Make sure the power button plan is set to actually turn off.   Use control panel to find the power button plan

When you click on shut down (the windows power off) It may be actually sleeping and NOT turning off.

Change the plan so it actually turns off.

Even if the the plan is to turn off, be sure that the LED lights on the keyboard turn off before closing the lid. My Surface pro 4 was really  bad about that.  Closing the lid before it actually turned off put it to sleep instead.

[tlise]

I have this set

How can I check what it is set for if I go to (windows icon/Power icon) shut down? That is the way I have always done it as I know its not good to use the actual button without shutting down.  I did look around settings and a quick google but I couldn't see anything else. Just what I am doing, 

But I do always make sure all the lights go out. 

Thank you for your help 🙂

[BeemerBiker]

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@tlise wrote:

I have this set

🙂

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I think if on battery if you close the lid it needs to sleep or turn off.  Else it is on all the time and with the lid closed it might overheat.

Should be OK to set the system to sleep when pressing the sleep button.