What to do if laptop battery drains when turned off

[BeemerBiker]

Clicking on the windows 10 or 11 power "Shut Down" should turn off the laptop. 

If your laptops is unplugged and you find the battery has significantly drained overnight,  one or move devices are drawing power.  Windows can allow some devices to continue to draw power.  it is also possible that a Windows update replaced a device driver with one that is not power efficient.  

Some devices know to cause power drain

• USB hubs that can allow charging of devices
• Thunderbolt port that can be used to dock with
• The Intel Management Engine may tasks some device to maintain power.

Run the following command from the windows administrators command prompt to find devices that can wake up a laptop or desktop that is supposedly turned off.

powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

for example the following devices are enabled even if the PC is turned off

They are all drawing power EVEN WHEN LAPTOP IS TURNED OFF.

Use the device manager to prevent the above devices from waking up a system

If is also possible the battery was drained because the system was put to sleep instead of being turned off.

1 - If you close the lid of the laptop to soon after clicking the windows power "Shut Down" it is possible the laptop went to sleep first.

2 - If you press the power button to turn the laptop off you probably put the laptop to sleep instead of turning it off.  Use the control panel to check the power plan and ensure that the system actually turns off when your press the power button.  Here is a typical plan and the default is to sleep.