Lower Zenbook Power Consumption due to Asus Smart Gesture

EDIT: It appears flunserl has found a better solution further in this thread, HERE: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ption-due-to-asus-smart-gesture.741039/page-2

My old post is below for reference:

This guide will significantly lower power consumption if you use the Asus Smart Gesture application. This will result in significantly better battery life and better thermals.

Explanation and background:
The Asus Smart Gesture application is unfortunately the best option many Zenbook owners use for touchpad drivers. The features it provides are decent, but come at a cost: whenever zooming or rotating, it forces the system to a higher power state permanently. More specifically, it forces the current CPU minimum CPU state to 100%, the system cooling policy to Active (start fans before throttling), and the Intel Graphics profile to maximum power.

This guide will run a task to enforce settings whenever Windows detects a change to the power plan (ie: when the Asus Smart Gesture application changes the power settings).

Caveats:

• This only works on the Balanced power scheme.
• I chose settings myself for full power when plugged in and decent battery life.

Step 1: Copy and paste the XML from the following link into your favorite text editor (Notepad is fine): http://pastebin.com/mgZbVE39
Note: This was updated because NBR screws up the formatting of the Subscription line. There should be a few "& gt;" and a few "& lt;" (without spaces)


Step 2: Save as an XML file somewhere. Remember where you saved it.
2a: Don’t know how to make an XML file? After pasting into Notepad, click File-> Save As, then change “Text file (*.txt)” to “All Files (*.*)” in the drop box above the Save button.
2b: Name the file “Lower Power.xml” (without quotes) and click Save.

Step 3: Open up the Task Scheduler. You can start typing “schedule task” into the start menu. The icon looks like a gear (Windows 8) but could be clock (Windows 7).

Step 4: Right click on the “Task Scheduler Library” folder and click “Import Task”

Step 5: Browse and find the XML file you saved earlier and click open. You should see the task appear in the scheduler window.
The end.

Advanced explanation, customization notes and stuff:
This task runs powercfg.exe to modify the Balanced power scheme, which is the one that the Asus Smart Gesture modifies. It runs four times, changing the following settings:

PHP:

/SETDCVALUEINDEX SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMIN 0

Changes the minimum CPU throttle to 0% on battery. The last number can be anything from 0 to 100.

PHP:

/SETACVALUEINDEX SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMIN 4

Changes the minimum CPU throttle to 4% when plugged in. The last number can be anything from 0 to 100. I arbitrarily set it to 4 when I was testing what was getting changed, but it’s a good number.

PHP:

/SETDCVALUEINDEX SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR SYSCOOLPOL 0

Changes the cooling policy on battery to Passive (throttle the CPU a little before firing up the fans). Can be set to Active by changing the 0 to a 1.

PHP:

/SETDCVALUEINDEX SCHEME_BALANCED 44f3beca-a7c0-460e-9df2-bb8b99e0cba6 3619c3f2-afb2-4afc-b0e9-e7fef372de36 0

Sets the Intel graphics to power saving mode on battery. These crazy numbers are just GUIDs for the Intel Graphics power settings. You can change the last number: 0 means maximum power savings, 1 means balanced, and 2 means maximum performance.


Another setting you can try if you’re feeling ambitious:

PHP:

/SETDCVALUEINDEX SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMAX 99

Setting the maximum CPU throttle to 99 will disable Intel TurboBoost. This example does this on battery. I chose not to do this because there is another setting for Intel TDP which limits the CPU wattage to 17/13/10W. The Asus Smart Gesture app doesn’t change that setting, so it’s not covered in this guide.


Results
My average battery life jumped from 2.5-3h to 4.5-6h. It's quite significant and a massive oversight from Asus.

Let me know if you have any questions! I hope this helps some people love their Zenbooks again.

 

Hey, when I try to import this I get an error:

"The format of this task is not valid. The following error was reported: (11,23):Subscription:"

I'd really like to use this, as, like you said, Asus Smart Gesture is a power hog for no reason.

 

I'm getting the same error. I assume there's something wrong on the 23rd part of the 11th line, which is the "subscription" line. I don't know anything about this stuff, though.

 

yes, i am getting the same error also. does anyone have a fix?

 

Sorry everyone. It seems NBR's forum formatting has screwed up the XML file. There are "& lt;" and "& gt;" strings that got converted into < and > when they shouldn't have. You can find a better version of this XML here:

[XML] Lower Asus SmartGesture power usage - Pastebin.com

 

Hi Duct Tape Dude,
I don't know if you still follow this thread but I tried to do what you say on my zenbook UX303 but I have an error when I import the task, the task scheduler says :
"(3,8)::ERROR: text/xmldecl ,ot at the beginning of in put"
Don't know what to do...
Will be great if someone could help, I know I'm not alone with this error!

Thanks a lot!

 

..still no update from Asus about this. They gave me the impression at support that they were willing to reduce the "boost" a bit, to avoid setting the processor so high every time you scroll (but were unwilling to disable it..).

And I'm having no luck trying to figure out where the calls come from in the smartgesture software, so I could be able to do some dirty hack or other so people could set the specific clock based on which profile they're running, for example. Since.. removing the function seems more difficult, and would require a decompile in a way that the program doesn't seem to allow...

But -- of course, it would not be difficult for Asus to simply remove the function, or to make it optional, so people can at least choose between "increased response", and (significantly) longer battery life. Frankly, it makes no sense in any way to have this function on a system that doesn't run pure software acceleration of the desktop. Which no windows computer since Vista and Win7 does since the intel updates last summer/aero + indirect rendering pipeline through the dwm, even with the standard drivers. A fresh install will now never select it (and why would you want that anyway).

So I don't know -- if people could write and ask support to change the smartgesture program to make the processor boost while scrolling optional, that would be absolutely fantastic.

 

This is no longer a big issue it seems, the settings bump up whenever you use gestures sure but they will return to your set values after a few seconds if you dont use any more gestures. I get around 6h of usage from my ux32ln from the day of purchase so this is an old issue that they have somewhat resolved

 

Sure. But why have the issue at all?

..Their direct override type code ends up eventually breaking the power profile switching as well.

 

Hey! Same thing Here!
I get the same error as Allan174 on my UX303LN wich i find very strange since i tried the fix 10days a go with the computer straight from out of the box and it worked just fine... Then i did a fresh install of Win8.1 and SmartGesture on an SSD an now i get this : (3,8)::ERROR: text/xmldecl ,ot at the beginning of input"
I honestly know nothing about xml, it maybe a common error... Does anyone have an idea?

 

What if i simply switch off the touch pad (Fn + F9) and use a mouse? will the battery life still be dramatically effected by Asus Smart Gesture?

 

UX303LN user.

I believe if you don't use Smart Gestures, your CPU will not jump to 2.4ghz+ which will definitely help this situation.
Using an external BT mouse significantly adds to my battery life. I choose not to disable gesture as it plays an important part of my laptop experience, but continue to try to use my Logitech T630 mouse when I can, where space permits.

 

Is disabling gestures like zooming and rotating a workaround to this problem?
I mean, what are the gestures that affect the CPU min percentage?

I only use scrolling with 2 fingers.

Thanks.

 

Hi,

towards you and the other guys with this problem:

Its really easy to fix. If you look closly at the stuff that you copied and pasted, you will notice that there are a few empty rows ar the beginning of the document. Delete those, make sure that the xml-code starts in the very first row. Thats all. Now save it again and import it with task-scheduler and your done. Works like a charm for me, getting now around 8:30 Hours with my UX303LN (i5/256GB/8GB/840M/EU Model with 1080p) while doing office stuff.

@DuctTapeDude: Thanks a lot for your code! It obviously helped me a lot :thumbsup:

 

EDIT: pls disregard

 

Agreed. I successfully added it into the task scheduler but the core still goes up to 2.5GHz when I use the zoom gesture. I'm using 3.0.10. on UX303LN

 

SOLUTION!

I recently purchased a UX303LN as replacement for my beloved Acer Aspire TimelineX 3820TG.

First thing I do after a clean install, is optimizing the OS for lowest noise and best batterylife.

Not having full Control over the powerplan drove me nuts, and I was very happy to find this post and that I'm not alone

Today I found the solution to this nasty behavior on superuser.com

You can add a DWORD value with Regedit to disable that behaviour:

In HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ASUS\ASUS Smart Gesture

Add the DWORD AutoSetMaxPower, set it to 0 and reboot.

All credits to User JakeGould

I can confirm, the solution works under UX303LN / Win 10 Smart Gesture Ver.405

flunserl

 

Oh, wow. Thank you, thank you so much. Yes!

edit: the kicker is probably that the scroll is smoother now, and I also don't randomly lose focus to the smartgesture program in the background with apps that have exclusive contexts.