power management

Most of the time, the laptop is plugged in and connected to a docking station and external monitor. The "close lid" option is set to do nothing and the battery is in conservation mode (charges to 55-60%). Is there any reason to use sleep or hibernate modes, rather than having it run all the time? Any other power management recommendations, to extend battery and laptop life? Thanks! ...Steve

 

If you have the laptop plugged into a dock most of the time and that's where you use the laptop most of the time, why not simply unplug the battery and use the laptop battery-less until you need to use it on-the-go?

 

if the dock drives an external display, disable hybernation, and prevent any actions that takes the computer to sleep, treat it just like a desktop

though I would not run the laptop battery-less, and here's the reason:

1) it is docked "most of the time" so you don't ever benefit from the battery life, even if the battery is at its life-span you don't loose much since you won't be using it either way

2) running a laptop battery-less until it is outdated, and then purchase a new laptop with another battery dimension, this means the original 'wanna-protect' battery will not be used anways so why not leave it in the system as a backup powersource until it dies with the laptop

3) unless it is a laptop with decent cooling(which it probably is given it has a designated dock) I advise against leaving the laptop 24/7 powered on, but hey, it sounds like a laptop with designated dock is business class laptop with decent cooling, running it 24/7 should not impact on its 4-6 year lifespan much, and it will be running very outdated hardware by the end of its life spectrum anyway

conclusion: disable any sleep/hibernation, leave the laptop docked and battery inserted and let it do what its designed to do, the battery if not used often is served as a backup source in case of a power surge, not that you loose the battery's value when it died but instead you started off using the laptop the way a desktop is designed for, so the value on the battery (for you) is negligible to start with

 

Oops, sorry, it's not a designated dock - it's a Plugable USB docking station, using it with a Lenovo Yoga2. Does this mean I should put it into sleep or hibernate mode? Hate to do that because of backup programs that run overnight.

 

definitely not hibernation because it risks leading the SSD into a panic lock (google it, hate to explain)

sleep or shutdown is fine, but i'd set it to be only doable not on the power button but instead the shutdown options only -> meaning the only way of powering off or sleeping the laptop is either by the long power button press OR selecting it on the windows UI, you can though set the power button to be dedicated to sleep or shutdown at your favour

you should shutdown the laptop before you sleep, if you leave backup programs running overnight feel free to use some kind of auto sleep/shutdown program or via task scheduler

always do the shutdown/sleep manually when plugged in is my recommendation, only time when closing the lid = sleep, power button = shutdown is when running on battery

 

It's not a user-replaceable battery (Lenovo Yoga2), I think this would be pretty difficult...

 

Any recommendations for the various battery options? (critical battery action, low battery level, critical battery level, low battery action, reserve battery level)

Thanks!