Spectre x360 Battery Life

[leongwengheng]

Get a Dell XPS 13 i5 and full HD. That's meant to last for ages. I've given up on the battery life on my x360. 5-6 hours for Windows 10 it is (used to be 6-7 on Windows 8.1).

[dannyboy2005]

The XPS does have a good battery life, along with a portable battery you can take in your laptop bag, what a brillant idea! it also charges phone and tablets lasting around 28 hours. 

The spectre has the looks and capibilities but the battery lets it down.

[Ruzy]

I have the older version (the one that was released earlier this year) I used to get around 10-11 hours easily on Windows 8 without doing any modifications. With Windows Windows 10 the game changed, even with Cortana being completely off (doesn't listen and doesn't use location and stuff), brightness around 60-70 I'm getting around 7.5-8 hrs.
I can tell you for sure, based on my experience, that windows 10 is killing it, for one thing Windows 10 constantly searches for updates and installs them in the background and that makes the fans working very often-so the next thing I will try is to get rid of auto update feature to see what happens.
I have an i7 8 GIG Ram with FHD display

I will post my experiences again

[dannyboy2005]

Ruzy - So in hindsight, what we should of done  is get the x360 Spectre i5, Windows 8.1 and a FHD display. Less powerfull processor (not that it'll bother me on a daily basis), Windows 8.1 will manage the battery better and the FHD is far less thirsty then the QHD:smileyindifferent:

[Ruzy]

Dannyboy- based on my experience i7 with Windows 8 and FHD would get you around 10 with a normal usage (Word-YouTube-web surfing).

And I think Windows 10 is getting better with new updates each time around-anyway, I think it's not the machine since I used to consistently get around 10-11 hrs when I had Windows 8 installed maybe Windows 10 is optimized for newrer processors not the older ones.

[MTTB]

You might find the following article interesting: 
http://reviews.gizmodo.com/windows-10-battery-life-is-better-except-when-its-worse-1720970961
To prevent background updates in Windows 10, you may want to try meter your wi-fi:
http://www.windowscentral.com/how-disable-windows-10-update-delivery-optimization
 
Windows 10 will affect the battery life of any laptop you buy. Based on this article and review, the Dell XPS 13 will also have trouble meeting the 15-18 hour battery life. Also, the XPS 13 at maximum brightness is much dimmer than the HP x360's max screen brightness. Dell limits brightness to maintain optimal battery life. 
 
I was very close to buying the XPS 13 but the x350 won me over with its versatility and beautiful design. I have the HP spectre x360 the 6th gen i5 (Skylake) with FHD monitor (chosen for best battery life).  From my experience over the last one month, I can get 12.5 hours battery if I use 40% screen brightness while I have Chrome, Word, Endnote and multiple pdf docs open. If you look in settings>battery usage, the screen consumes 69% of my power, system operations 30% and wifi only 1%. Obviously, battery life would decrease at higher screen brightness. 
 
There is no noticeable difference between the i7 and i5 processors, unless you are doing hardcore gaming or multimedia operations. Honestly, if you need to do CPU intensive tasks like gaming or multimedia, an ultrabook is not for you.

[kayellem]

Has there been any solutions to this? 

[Ruzy]

Disable Cortana, make sure you have latest bios, don't install Windows 10 and stick with Windows 8 if possible

[Wikkus]

Sorry, but this is as believable as Donald Trump's hair. Chrome, unfortunately, uses more resources (and therefore power) than Edge, so that's strike one.

I don't do "hardcore gaming" on mine -- it's not capable, for one -- and "multimedia" is more vague than the leading edge of a fog bank. I do a modest amount of photo editing. There's strike two.

Strike three is that you're claiming better numbers than HP originally did despite 1) those original numbers being based on synthetic tests and 2) despite not mentioning any other changes.

As for the Win8 advantage over WinX, I call BS too: my machine came with Win8 and I got pretty much the exact same performance with that as I now do with WinX.

[MTTB]

This is from my one month experience with my HP spectre with an i5, FHD screen and Windows 10. Other system specs probably won't get the same performance.

You can reduce CPU usage in Chrome by removing unecessary extensions. I only have the uBlock extension to stop ads as it use less resources compared to AdBlocker or Adguard. I was using Edge and Firefox but found it causes the display driver to fail. When scrolling fast on pages with a lot of images, the display freezes or goes blank and you get the message "Display diver stopped responding and has recovered". Display driver crashes A LOT when I use Edge to browse catchoftheday.com.au, and occasionally in Firefox. Subsequently, I now only use Chrome and never have this problem. Often it is particular web pages that cause high CPU usage, not the actually browser. For instance scrolling the Facebook home page cause sudden spikes of high CPU in BOTH Chrome and Firefox.

When I first got my machine, I was getting about 4-5 hours battery life (possibly due to all the background updates). Now, I can get 10-12 hours during word processing, email and reading pdfs. The battery drains much faster when watching movies or playing light games (e.g. candy crush), 7-8 hours. I have followed recommendation of previous posts: (i) disabling Cortana, (ii) lowering screen brightness (40% or less), (iii) turned off the keyboard backlight, (iv) avoid visiting websites that use high CPU (e.g. Facebook or anything with lots of ads and video), (v) updating to latest BIOS, (vi) manually update Windows 10 in setting before unplugging (hoping to prevent random background updates).