My laptop battery drains when completely shutdown

As I recall and I'm confident Denis or Luiz will confirm, the Windows 10 default setting for Fast Startup is enabled.

And again, as I recall, if you disable Hibernation using Command Line, that also disables Fast Startup. I'm certain I've verified this status on my PC in the past few days.

Update;
I had to know the answer tonight. And yes, I have hibernation disabled which should also disable Fast Startup.






I wonder if this behavior has been modified and it's now possible to have Fast Startup enabled while Hibernation is disabled. This would certainly explain why the sudden change in battery behavior.

One other observation, the Sleep behavior has been working recently as well as waking from sleep with moving my mouse. That hasn't functioned since 2020 when I was using winver 1809.

I'll investigate this further tomorrow.

This irregular battery behavior is only about 7-10 days old for my PC.

I manage Windows update with Matthew's cmd & VB scripts. I may not have received certain updates on the same schedule as messerschmitt or anyone using Windows Updates.

Just for fun, I enabled Fast Startup & Hibernation and then disabled them. I haven't been able to find any further information on this development anywhere online.







I will have to investigate how many updates I've accepted in the past month and consider if I want to start uninstalling to determine which update has added this PITA feature. If that process doesn't remove this behavior, I may consider clean installing 1909.

That would not be my preference but I can't have my laptop held hostage by M$ and their infinite wisdom in how I should operate my PC.

unifex said:

@W10 Tweaker: I think you're on to something. I just performed the following test on my desktop machine. Of course, there is no battery, but we can test whether the machine drains power while shut down. Indeed, two ways of shutting it down produce different results.

Method 1 - regular GUI shutdown (start button - power - shutdown).

Method 2 - command line shutdown (I used simply "shutdown /s").

Obviously, both methods shut down the machine. However, after the first method, the keyboard lits up if any key is pressed (again, this is while the machine is shut down!), but after the second it does not. This tells me that the motherboard does draw some energy while being supposedly shutdown.

Now, the start up takes significantly longer if the machine is shutdown using the Method 2 (command line). Which makes me think, this whole issue must have to do with some sort of fast startup setting in BIOS, that by whatever reason is not triggered by the command line shutdown. I'll try to disable this setting tomorrow and try again to see if that makes any difference.

Hi unifex,


What you're describing does sound like Hybrid Sleep and/or Fast Startup is enabled. See my post #31 & 32 in this thread for more info.

From an elevated Command Prompt, enter or copy n paste the following;

Code:

powercfg /a

This will determine if Fast Startup is enabled or not.

I may have found a tweak to fix this behavior, I just require more time for testing to decide if it works successfully.

I've recently discovered my MSI GP-72 laptop has been using excessive battery power during sleep or shutdown. What's up with that?

This may be directly related to the OP's complaint, so, I'm including this info here. To @messerschmitt, please review the following and feel free to draw comparisons to your laptop's behavior and add any comments. You might also try this tweak and start keeping a log of the performance.

From what I've been reading, M$ has removed our ability to disable Modern Standby beginning with winver 2004 and 20H2. There was a registry tweak that no longer functions. You might think, I rarely use Standby, so this doesn't concern me.

If using a Desktop, you may not care that a standard shutdown using WinX or the start menu is now only a type of Hibernation. If you're using a laptop, this behavior will impact the longevity of your battery, especially if you use a power cycling process to extend the battery life.

Something I find interesting is that my PC does not support 'S0 Modern Standby' yet it was suddenly consuming vast amounts of battery power while sleeping or Shutdown. I believe it was suddenly using Hybrid Sleep instead of S3 Standby (Sleep) even though hibernation was disabled.

I wasn't satisfied that my battery had suddenly expired after 2.5 years of meticulous processes to extend the battery life.

I did locate a registry tweak that seems to have corrected the excessive battery loss during shutdown and it may have also reduced the drain during Standby. I require more time for testing before I can 'Green Stamp' this tweak, however; I'm convinced it does reduce the loss of charge during a standard shutdown.

I recorded the battery's state of charge (SOC), time/date and method of shutdown or sleep and tracked the SOC % change at the next start.

On 0517, I used a Win X, u, u shutdown while the battery SOC was at 85%. After 11.5 hours, starting the PC, I recorded a drop in the SOC of 40% (to 45%). Either my battery is cooked or my PC wasn't truly shutdown.

Using a Command line shutdown (ACP> shutdown /s /f /t 0) on this same date, I recorded a battery SOC change of only 2% for 8 hours. This confirmed, in my mind, that the standard shutdown was more of a Hibernation.

After adding the following registry tweak and using the standard shutdown (Win X, u ,u) I've observed a battery SOC drop of 2.6% after 8.5 hours, a huge improvement to a 40% loss after 11.5 hours.

Before making any changes to your registry, create a restore point and you might also create an OS image if you're in the practice of using Macrium Reflect Free or similar app.

From an Administrative Command Prompt (ACP), type or copy n paste the following;

Code:

reg add HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power /v PlatformAoAcOverride /t REG_DWORD /d 0

Most of these shutdown or extended sleep tests have to be completed overnight (at least for me) and does slow the reporting process. Although I'm satisfied that this solution is successful for the standard shutdown process, more testing is required to resolve if this fix is functional for S3 Standby (Sleep).

Just in the hope of avoiding misunderstandings:-

S0 Modern standby is a !"£$%^&*()_+<>?,.?|\`¬ <adjectives removed by forum moderator>
S0 Modern standby is a glorified idle condition not a sleep condition.

W10 Tweaker said:

From what I've been reading, M$ has removed our ability to disable Modern Standby beginning with winver 2004 and 20H2. There was a registry tweak that no longer functions. You might think, I rarely use Standby, so this doesn't concern me.

What you have read is incorrect. When I looked into this it seemed to me that that there might have been a version or two for which the disabling command did not work [possibly 1903, 1909 but I did not reinstall them just to test them].
I have an S0 computer and I have tried the disabling command in Version 20H2. It works, it disables S0 Modern standby. Sadly, the command does not necessarily enable S3 Sleep on all computers.

W10 Tweaker said:

From an Administrative Command Prompt (ACP), type of copy n paste the following;

Code:

reg add HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power /v PlatformAoAcOverride /t REG_DWORD /d 0

The is the S0 Modern standby disabling command.
Disabling modern standby - MSDocs


Best of luck,
Denis

If I was using a Desktop PC that had a HDD for the OS, I might be OK with Fast Startup providing it wasn't creating any other headaches. Depending on the vintage of your PC, it may not support S0.

Fast Startup is different from Fast Boot, a UEFI option.

Enable or Disable Fast Boot in UEFI Firmware Settings for Windows



If you'd like to disable Fast Startup and don't use Hibernation, you may follow this Tutorial to disable Hibernation. this will also disable Fast Startup which you can confirm with powercfg /a.

Enable or Disable Hibernate in Windows 10

If you do use Hibernation and want to disable Fast Startup only, go to Power Options and click 'Choose what the power buttons do'. On the next window, click 'Change settings that are currently unavailable' and Fast Startup should appear in the Shutdown settings list at the bottom. I have Hibernation disabled, so the Fast Startup option does not appear.





One of the messages I was trying to convey in my previous post is that, even though my laptop doesn't support S0, something has changed such that the standard GUI shutdown is no longer a true shutdown, as it was previously.

The internal battery was losing 40% after 11.5 hours when it used to lose about 2%.

Again, on this PC with winver 2004, I was able to correct this significant loss in the battery's state of charge (SOC) by applying the previously mentioned registry tweak. This fix, for this PC, is not perfect, just an improvement.

I can again use a standard shutdown, (Win X, u, u, or via the start menu), and only lose a small amount of the SOC overnight, less than 5%. I thought it was a bit better than that before this change but could be mistaken. I have a few distractions these days.

A feature that now appears to be completely broken on this PC, while using winver 2004, is the previous behavior of S3 Standby. The battery's SOC now decays by about 12% after ~8.5 hours. I used to be able to leave my PC in a sleep state for a few days, without any concern.

Hopefully, someone will identify a solution and share this info.