Power drain on standby

I am doing some maintenance on an XPS M1330.
Still running Vista 32 bit.

My wife had repeatedly reported battery problems and I had changed it a couple of times... apparently these 3rd party cheap batteries being no good.

On closer inspection (using BatteryBar) I discovered that when in Standby the battery was being drained at about 500 mWh... about 10x what I think is probably normal. That means after 3 days of Standby the battery would be flat (might not actually be flat in practice as I think I have configured hybrid sleep which would change to Hibernate at some point).
Anyway - this may have been aging the battery and resulting in some of the battery problems my wife was reporting.

So I wonder what tips there are for diagnosing what is causing the power consumption. The machine has an SSD (not the original one as it got full and also reached it's theoretical operating hour limit).

I know in the past some of my Dell machines sometimes seemed to wake during sleep - I would hear the CD drive being checked. I think that is not occurring anymore and not on this one (though I suppose that might happen anyway when switching from Sleep to Hibernate). One check of event log did not seem to show anything happening during sleep.... but today I closed the lid and when I re-opened I saw the WiFi and Bluetooth lights still on - and the machine did not come back to life until I pressed the power switch. Then the event log shows a lot of Bonjour Service messages continuing right through the sleep period. examples:
Task Scheduling Error: Continuously busy for more than a second
Task Scheduling Error: m->NextScheduledEvent 228620
Task Scheduling Error: m->NextScheduledSPRetry 229618

I am updating the Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN driver.
(I had an earlier Pro Set installed... not the Dell OEM versions. I notice the release notes of the new one from Intel state:
"Wake on Wireless LAN is not present in this version of the application." )

I also found Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) enabled on the wireless network connection so I disabled that.

 

3 days is perfectly normal for standby battery life. Standby actually keeps the laptop powered on at a minimal level, where it keeps contents in RAM. It consumes about 2% of the power that a full system on would consume.

It sounds like what you really want is Hibernate (and not Standby / Suspend). Try that. Your computer takes all the data in RAM, and stores it on your drive SSD in a special hibernate file. This allows the laptop to power down completely, but still give you the option to resume from where you left off when you power the laptop back on.

As for activity while your laptop is off... Those are settings called wake on LAN, wake on USB. They are there for remote access to your computer when it is off, bad you intentionally want it to wake up even if suspended. You can adjust this setting if you want (in BIOS and Windows power options), but this isby really the cause of your problem. Just hibernate your machine, or power it down completely, and you won't have these issues anymore.

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