Laptop very slow on battery power, very fast on AC power

[KCDMZ]

I see variations of this question all over the place in the HP community, but nothing that answers the problem. The fact that I see this going back to at least 2017 makes me worry that I may have made a bad choice purchasing this laptop. My past HP experience has been really good, so I'm cautiously hopeful. In my case, I have a 10th gen i7 with 16 GB RAM and an SSD, and the F.15 BIOS. If I boot the system from power off on AC power, I can log in and begin work in about 30-35 seconds. If I repeat the exact steps on battery power, it takes about 4 minutes. 

Before the you jump in with possible answers:

1) as this is Post to OS login, OS settings are not to blame for the 3 minutes of pre-OS time consumed - don't tell me to adjust power settings.

2) this used to be an indication of not having the "Enable DC Turbo Boost" (something like that) enabled in the Advanced BIOS screen. I am running F.15 (current as of this writing) and there is no Advanced menu. HP is protecting me from myself I suppose.

3) I have been able to see anecdotally only that the CPU does not peak in utilization when running on DC power. This looks like a throttling situation. Just to test, I did try setting CPU minimum on battery to 75%, up from the default 5%. This did not make very much difference at all. That indicates to me a BIOS throttling. Again, anecdotal, but very interesting I think. It also means that just putting up with slow boot and then having a normal experience while using the OS is not an option.

Does anyone have any ideas or experience with this issue recently, like in the last year? If so, did you resolve it?

[banhien]

@KCDMZ 

Please give it option to run 100% CPU on Battery. For Windows 11, please try

              https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/change-the-power-mode-for-your-windows-pc-c2aff038-22c9-...

Regards.

[KCDMZ]

I appreciate you wanting to help, but your answer makes no sense. I think you missed the part where I noted that the performance suffers during POST, before the OS even starts. Also, I noted that I did try changing the CPU performance settings in the Power Plan, which by default for max performance at 100% for both battery and AC. I tried limiting the reduction to 75% minimum on battery, and it made very little difference.   In short, I noted in my original post that I've already tried these suggestions and that just jumping to Power Plan was not what I was asking.

[KCDMZ]

A little more info - from this graph below, you can see exactly when I reconnected the power supply while trying to open a program.

To repeat, the throttling starts at POST, so long before I get to this point, i.e., OS running. I do have Windows set for maximum performance, in an attempt to overcome the throttling once the OS is running. In this test, I have CPU minimum power set to 50%. At no time does the CPU exceed 25% when running on battery power. This behavior clearly changes when power is connected. This seems to indicate that Windows is being overridden by BIOS. There is no Advanced menu available in the F.15 BIOS (which is current) so I cannot change the setting that normally fixes this. 

The only anomaly from original is that the original HP battery failed and swelled. HP showed backordered for several months. Their support experience was terrible, but that's a different post. Basically, I could let them take back the laptop for maybe 3 months or just buy a new battery off the shelf at the local store. The battery works just fine, charges quickly, etc. The only thing is that it is missing the HP chip so it registers that the battery might be a counterfeit (which is HP's attempt to scare you into paying 150% for a battery.) If anyone truly thinks that HP has disabled their laptops to not function with a non-HP-branded battery, please provide some data to back that up; idle speculation isn't going to help solve the problem here.

I never thought I'd have to test the laptop on battery power before the return period ran out; I'm hoping I didn't waste my money on this HP laptop. It is unusable on battery power due to the performance throttling. I'm starting to travel again for work, so I have to solve this problem.

[KCDMZ · Accepted solution]

Thank you to everyone who saw this post, read it, and didn't just throw some guess as a reply. I truly appreciate that, and it tells me from the number of views and lack of replies that this is a systemic problem. So, here's the solution I'm using. Anything beyond this point is "follow at your own discretion." 

The problem seems to come down to the intelppm.sys driver. For whatever silly reason, when your laptop is unplugged, this driver seems to go nuts with the BDProcHot register. This is the bidirectional process hot, and allows components other than the CPU heat sensor to throttle your processor. It is not the same as ProcHot. There's a plausible explanation for why this is so, but the reality of it existing is that your new laptop runs like a 486 when on battery power. I found lots of folks throwing garbage warnings about your motherboard burning up, which brings me back to "thank you for not just throwing nonsense guesses as a reply." You still have the ProcHot sensor which actually monitors CPU temperature, and can turn off your system if it deems it necessary. I have not seen any actual temperature issues while actively monitoring CPU temperature and running on battery with BDProcHot disabled. I'm not mining crypto or playing games that make the CPU smoke, so again, "follow at your own discretion." If someone knows more about this technically, I'd love to learn more (and please be kind in your post).

Basically, it seems like there are 2 ways to disable this bit of faulty control programming. The first is to go into your registry and disable the intelppm.sys driver by setting it's start value to 4 (disabled). That key is here for me: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\intelppm.

The second way is to leverage a program such as ThrottleStop and simply disable the DBProcHot sensor. In case you don't know, this is a CPU tuning tool and is a great way to truly cause some damage, unless you are sure you know what you're doing. If you go down this path, make sure to follow instructions and maybe don't change anything  except the DBProcHot. If you search for "BDProcHot throttling" you'll find a lot of hits and lively discussion. I found this succinct set of instructions here for both methods: https://www.wintips.org/fix-cpu-not-running-at-full-speed-in-windows-10/#method-3. Many thanks to the author.

I find that running on battery my laptop still boots like a 486 (who does the UAT testing before they sell a $1000 laptop anyway? How did you miss this?) Once I get logged in, suddenly everything runs normally. I even get the fan kicking on as expected while running on battery. I can also work from a coffee shop or airport and do not have to wait 45 seconds to over a minute every time I try to launch a program. Also, as much as I'd like to vent my anger on HP for selling me a booby trapped, expensive laptop, they are only partially to blame. This seems to be an issue with all machines using the intelppm.sys (ASUS ROG group has a lot of conversation about this problem too.). This also seems to be a problem that many have known about for years, at least back to Win 10 original upgrade, and manufacturers have done NOTHING about it. 

I still blame HP for moving forward with a machine designed to run on battery power that is almost useless when running on batter power. I'm seriously disappointed, just in case any HP rep with authority to fix stuff gets this far in the post. It is pointless to try and use support or customer service to get feedback up the chain; that message dies in an overseas call center. There really is no customer service once they deposit your money, which sadly is a new and disappointing experience for me with HP. Good luck to all of you who can no longer return your laptops, I hope this helps. Shame on you, HP, for letting this go unaddressed for so long.