NC battery discharging on standby

Hi, fellow NC10 fans.

Got my NC10 last week and I'm thrilled. But...

The past two nights I've used the machine in bed on battery. Then I've put it into Standby (from the Start button). Both mornings I've woken up and the battery is completely drained.

I thought maybe I had a dud battery but yesterday I used the machine for four hours on battery and the gauge still showed 50%. So it ain't that.

So, I'm scratching my head here. Is this a known issue? Have I done something dumb (highly likely).

I'd really appreciate any suggestions, peeps.

Thanks!

 

Standby doesn't stop the power consumption. It just reduces it compared to the computer running.

Use hibernate, when saves the memory to the hard disk and then shuts everything down. When you turn the computer on the RAM contents reload from the hard disk to get you back to where you were.

John

 

Hi John,

Thanks for that suggestion. But it still seems very odd. I slept about seven hours last night, and the battery was drained. Now, if the NC10 can get seven hours when it's actually being used, surely standby uses a very minimal amount? No screen, no hard disk, no wi-fi. So you'd think there would be plenty of juice after seven hours.

Or ami I totally wrong about the amount of power used in standby?

 

I agree that standby shouldn't use that much power, but what was the remaining battery charge when you switched the computer to standby?

I'm just guessing that standby power drain could still be 3W (1W for CPU + 1W for chipset + 1W for RAM), in which case 7 hours = 21W. It's possible that the Atom isn't quite as economical on power as the more expensive Intel mobile CPUs, while the chipset is a relatively old design. Netbooks have made a big dent in Intel's profits so they have to leave some features where the newer hardware is better.

I'm a few thousand miles away from my NC10 so I can't make my own tests, but perhaps others are willing to check the power drain if the NC10 is left on standby overnight.

John

 

Well, that's a good point cos I had used it in bed for around an hour. Still and all.

I just left the machine in standby for three hours and when I resumed the battery meter showed 99% - more what I'd expect.

This is getting weirder!

 

Okay, finaly solved this. Bloody Windows update was bringing the machine out of standby to tell me there was an update waiting to be installed.

Annoyingly I'd uninstalled almost everything I'd loaded since last week in an attempt to find the culprit. It never occurred to me that Micrsoft would do something that dumb...

(Yes, I know...)

 

Thanks for the update on this problem.

Windows update tends to assume that computers are desktop machines in offices which are left to sleep and then do the updates overnight.

You have encountered one of the problems of standby: It is too easy for software to wake up the computer at some preset time. This has been known to cause overheating if the computer happens to be in a bag.

John

 

It also might be an issue with your hard disk sleep or hibernate function; several of us have run into an issue where the computer wakes up from sleep after the preset hard drive sleep or hibernate... and then doesn't go back to sleep. Ultimately the computer stays on until it dies out.