Battery Life-Turned Off?

This has been driving me a little crazy for a while now.
I have several Machines and they all seem different in their ability to maintain a charge when in Hibernate or even off all together?

What exactly may be happening to drain a battery when the machine is not even turned on?

My CF-T5 has the Mac-Like ability to suspend for several days and in Hibernate it seems to be off with no other drain for weeks at a time.

The CF-29 & 30's seem to suspend for a few days maybe and hibernate about the same length of time but they also seem to drain even when off.
I am under the impression that Hibernate and off essentially should use the same power and they seem to,some draining power?

For me battery performance is almost the most important function of a portable and thus I end up using my MacBook everywhere as it is always running.
The Macs do not Hibernate but they Suspend better than almost any WinPc I have used,and I have used a lot of them.

The only Windows machine I would compare them too was the original HP Omnibook that had "Instant On" where it really was off and then ready to use in just seconds.......like the Mac.

How hard cold it be to have this same performance in all machines?

Ed

 

Which OS are you using? That makes a big differnce. I can't stand using Hibernate myself. I know on W7 you can go in there and really do some fine tweaking with the power to alot of devices that you do not need to run at all. You can also run a program in the run command that will tell you exactly what is using power, suggestions, and errors.

 

I guess I mainly run XP Pro SP2 which is what they are suggesting for the Toughbooks.

I used the Win7 RC some but not in any serious way and don't see myself purchasing it or anything from MS ever in my life again if I don't have to.

Ed

 

Even in OFF mode, depending on your model.... You CF-29 sucks juice. To my knowledge... ALL laptops will use some power while in hibernation or suspend mode.... They will use more power in suspend mode and less in Hibernation as they are two different things entireley... You should Google it... I makes for interesting reading.

On another subject.... I set my Mom's new laptop I got her to go into hibernation when she closes the lid. So when she has a meeting or goes shipping, does gardening, etc.... She can just close the lid and it is quicker to start up instead of going through he whole boot-up process. Now I have to beat her with a stick to get her ever reboot it. In my experience... You need to reboot every now and then... You can't just keep hibernating and then coming back out 50 times and expect everything to work... Not in Bill Gates world anyway...

 

Suspend = contents in RAM are preserved, and thus the chips need to be powered
Hibernate = contents in RAM are written to the HD and on wakeup, reloaded back in to RAM. That's why they more RAM you have the slower the wakeup is.

But just like most electronics nowadays, there's always phantom power for sensing the power switch, wake-on-LAN, etc.

 

Thanks for the replies but I know the idea behind the two modes intimately.
They just do not work as advertised and that is what I am asking about.

Again,some models really do Hibernate which in theory should require ZERO power from the battery.
The T5 really acts like this.
The other ones do not?
I am not aware of any tweaking that can be done to the hibernated items in the machine or anywhere I can find out where these parasitic draws are.

If there really is some way in Win7 to do this tweaking that would be one reason to consider using it for a laptop,not a big one but one nonetheless.

There is often no power available where I am working and having to turn the computer off entirely to save battery is crazy.
One of my favorite features of the big Toughbooks is the big,honking long lived battery.

Ed

 

As I said.... I've never seen a laptop that didn't use some voltage in Hibernate Mode or Suspend.... Say what you want... I know the theory... But then there is reality. I would think that there would be no need for voltage loss either... But there is for some reason....

Now... Let the dwagon breathe his fire! (Or one of the other brainiacs... Or would that be bwainiacs?) <Sorry.... I'm just rolling on the floor on that one>

 

If it is Bwaniacs then it would certainly be dwagon bweathe his fire?

Anyway,that is what I am saying. Hibernate is supposed to be like off. Even when off some of these machines have some mysterious current draw or leakage.......but then some do not?

 

Here is a test you can do. Go buy yourself a WattMeter. Remove the battery and plug your laptop into the meter, then plug the meter into a receptacle. Put your machine in different modes and you will see exactly how much current your machine is pulling. Watts, Amps, AWH, Hz, etc. I have one somewhere around my house. I will test out what mine runs, although we can't do a proper comparison since we have different machines, OS's and such. At least it would give us something different to do

 

I've been wanting to buy those. But then you know what that means... My wife is going to want to pull the plug on everything in the house! (Especially all my chargers in the shop!)

 

As canuckcam wrote, usually the culprits are some ports that stay powered on. In XP (and maybe other Windows-versions) you can type powercfg -DEVICEQUERY "wake_armed" into a DOS prompt to get a list of the devices which are configured to remain on during hibernate, or you get the result "NONE" if there are none. Usually those ports can be configured to be switched off, but the method is different for each device.

I have also heard that some anti-virus programs can wake up a computer out of hibernation in order to perform scheduled checks and download updates. Supposedly they cooperate with the bios and set some kind of system alarm clock to make this possible. I have never had ths happen to me, though, so I'm not sure if this is true.

 

I have encountered this as well:
Our CF 28s (with XP) drain themselves when left in hibernate. When turned off "manually" they are OK.
(I prefer to call it "save-to-disk", as in my language I have seen it translated like "Asus Freeze mode manager". And we all like frozen windows, don't we? )

So my enterprise-wide "close the lid -> hibernate" solution failed. The laptops would be dead in the hour of most need.
So I invented a sheduled process so a closed lid meant SuspendMode, and then the Pana would wake itself after being unused for 30 mins, and turn itself off. Wow. great idea.
And then I found that the shutdown.exe command (in XP) left the Pana on, with that old win-95 sign
" It is now safe to turn the computer off "

GAAAAAHHHH!!!
I.e. Power Down is not Shut Down, not everybody knows that.
After a little googling I fond Exitwindows.exe which works prefectly.

 

Careful, though.
You will have problems with common cheap digital wattmeters, especially with "low power transient inductive loads" like a switched charger. The current doesn't look like a sine curve and can't be plotted/integrated/translated properly by the internal software.
Example: A desktop computer with and without monitor draws the same current according to my own wattmeter.

A turned off desktop PC drew "15 watts" (after a year the transformer may be luke warm) but it may as well be 9W. Or 5W.
(This particular warm PC later blew up right in my face when I was reinserting the plug, the PC was made 2000 when there was a scandal with unstable cheap electrolytic capacitors. )

 

I agree with you, but it will at least give him a comparison of what's going on. He just needs to make sure his battery is out of the unit.

 

powercfg.exe is in XP SP2. Not on my SP-free CF28. :/