Zenbook UX32VD battery life

I've had this notebook for 3 years, and the "poor" battery life has always been an issue. I'm sure that battery wear is a factor by now, but I'm rarely able to get more than 2, maybe 2.5 hours out of it with wifi on, and general/internet use. When it was new the figures weren't much better.

I'm using Windows 10 (which I upgraded to from W8 -> 8.1 over time), balanced Windows power plan, SSD vs HDD, screen is perhaps 1/3 brightness. I've also set the Nvidia driver to favour the integrated video.

Is there anything else I can try or is just the nature of the beast? I notice the fans are often running, and I strongly suspect that Chrome is eating the battery more than anything else (not sure if I can directly measure battery use by app?). I have read of others getting up to 5 hours or so of battery life (as well as the reviews), and it'd be amazing to get even a bit closer to that.

 

You can use task manager to see if anything is using a lot, chrome can be a bit hungry if you have a lot of tabs open.

 

Hello! Fellow UX32VD user here for three years now, and currently running Windows 10 Pro on it. This is an excellent laptop, very fast, and capable of decent light gaming. Of course, all this potential means it can have good battery life, or get to burn through your battery quite quickly. Apart from managing constant drain from Wifi/Screen Brightness/Sensors/using integrated GPU, good battery life is all about being smart with software and having your CPU as idle as possible - when pushed, your CPU can consume huge amounts of energy.

This is the most important thing: more than underclocking your CPU, making it idle most of the time wil work wonders for battery life. Modern processors have power states which mean parts of the CPU are shut off and don't consume power. Ex. The i7 in the UX32VD should be in C6 state (lowest power) most of the time - this is the difference between consuming 2w vs. up to 17w or more on the CPU.

The simplest recommendation is to not open many programs, but it defeats the purpose of working with your laptop, and negates the usefulness of having 10 Gb of RAM. Furthermore, which programs you run are much more important: for example we know using Chrome is absolutely awful for battery life, even if its the only program running. We all browse nowadays, picking a more power efficient browser is key for battery life - http://www.digitalcitizen.life/test...ser-will-make-your-laptop-battery-last-longer Note the more powerful device (SP3) with Core i CPU uses more peak energy than the Core M devices.

Chrome is a good example of what software shouldn't do - uses wrong settings under Windows (sets timer resolution to 1 ms - means the CPU is "woken up" 64 times more than normal), and Blink (the engine) seems to use more resources to load the same webpages (this also affects Opera). Of course, javascript/flash/media heavy webpages will consume more power, regardless of browser.

Other background processing software (helpers, utilities, etc) could also consume power, it depends on the software itself.

To better manage the software you use in your UX32VD, do the following.

• run CMD.exe (as administrator) and input: Powercfg -energy duration 60. Don't use the system. Check the report and note if any application has changed the system timer resolution; it should be 15.6 m. Also, if your idle CPU usage is >2%, it would be good to check your running applications, and identify the 'bad citizens' (check the report)
• Intel Power Gadget (https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power-gadget-20) is a nifty utility. At idle, the i7 on the UX32VD should use <2w. It will clearly show you how much energy the CPU can use when pushed.
• Process Explorer (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx) can help you pinpoint processes that are consuming too much CPU when idle - watch for the CPU time used by each program.
• Xperf from the Windows AIK can give you a more detailed report for the CPU usage of your programs, but this is much more complex - let me know if you want to know more.

My UX32VD is running 168 processes, but with (mostly) power efficient software. It has a ~2w CPU power consumption at idle, and runs around 3:45 hours with 30% battery wear (should reach >5 hours with a new battery). If I closed some programs, it would get better battery life, but I need those for my workflow. As a general rule, most current Microsoft applications tend to be good citizens, and Modern Apps (UWP) idle very well; ex. the default W10 media players (Movies + Video) use hardware acceleration efficiently, and have low CPU usage.

It all boils down to a tradeoff between your needs and preferences; there will be some programs you have to use, or will not want to change. Of course, maximizing the time your CPU is idle will give better battery life, and reduce temperatures and fan noise.

 

Great ideas. Still experimenting with some of my findings and how to tweak battery life. I find it a bit hard to believe that after 3.5 years I'm only at 14% battery wear, which seems much too low. I feel that wear level must be much higher to experience my 2h battery life and 3 day (max) standby.

 

Hope the battery life tweaking comes up good!

An additional tip when it comes to the browser: I have found ghostery to be a fantastic extension in chromium-based browsers to reduce idle activity in webpages - the background CPU usage per tab is really reduced by quite a lot!. I currently use Vivaldi (32-bit) with ghostery as the only extension, and the browser power consumption is quite decent.

I would like to use Edge full time (uses much less power when rendering/scrolling), but I still need it to have extension support!