[Guide] Improving Battery Life on Windows [+Enabling Deeper C States]

Edits:
05/01/2021 - Rewritten

With manufacturers chasing for thin and light systems, we haven’t seen much innovation in battery capacity and soon will have laptops so thin they'll slit our fingers when we touch them. Manufacturers now think that if new hardware is more efficient then the need for a large battery has reduced. In some laptop line-ups, the battery capacity has actually reduced, such as the Aspire E15 series.

To get your battery’s capacity in Whrs, multiply the voltage by the amp-hour rating. Your cell count doesn’t matter. E.g. a 11.4v 5.2Ah battery = 59Whrs.

On idle and a 0% brightness setting with no programs in the background (just windows desktop), modern & optimised:

13" laptops with 5th gen Intel Y-series CPUs (or later) should idle at around 2W.

15” laptops with 4th gen Intel U/Y series CPUs (or later) should idle at or below 3W.

15” laptops with HQ/HK CPUs should aim for about 6-8W on idle. Far more if you don’t have Optimus.

Laptops with full-on desktop CPUs and dual 1080s will have a hard time hitting even 10-15W on idle, I imagine. Don't get them.

My 14" Thinkpad E14 Idles at 2.0-2.1W (specs in signature).

Check with BatteryInfoView

All my PCs have been laptops. This guide includes all my experiences with working with laptops and will take some time and may be quite advanced to some users. If you are not comfortable doing something, please research before doing it yourself. Some parts may be risky and (unlikely) cause software issues (Windows failing to boot, iTunes not recognising devices). I will not be responsible for any harm done to your computer. Your mileage may vary, but:

I raised my battery life on my Xiaomi from 7hrs to 10+ hrs. Also my Teclast from 5hrs to a comfortable 7-8hrs

In 20 minutes of fiddling around with the settings, I raised the battery life of my friends’ Aspire V Nitro from 2-3hrs to 6hrs. I could have increased it more but I didn’t have the time.


Premise:

Laptop battery life can mostly be split up into two parts: System baseline power usage, and power usage actually dedicated to doing tasks.

System baseline power refers to the power your laptop uses when it’s on and doing nothing. This is power used for CPU Idle, display backlight, HDD/SSD idle, and for devices such as RAM just to stay on. Regardless of what you are doing on your laptop, this power remains constant. Depending on your

Power usage for processing is mostly affected by your CPU and GPU. This is unavoidable and no amount of software optimization will change how much power a CPU or GPU uses to complete a task. However, it is more efficient for a CPU to quickly boost to its maximum performance state to finish a task quickly, then rapidly drop down to an idle state.


This is the system power consumption of my ThinkPad E14 during a PC-Mark 10 Benchmark. I do not have a dedicated GPU on my laptop, so the chart tells you two things: The majority of power is consumed during tasks. The spikes are my CPU boosting to around 4GHz to complete a task, and then dropping down quickly to a baseline idle power.



Research
Ensure that the display is bright enough. You should look for a display brightness of at least 250 nits. A 300nit screen operating at 50% screen brightness is significantly efficient than a 150nit screen operating at 100% brightness.

Ensure that the touchpad/keyboard is good enough. By 2021, all laptops should be using Microsoft Precision touchpad drivers. Avoid using external mice, as they keep the CPU PCH/IO controllers active, along with using extra power.

Ensure that the battery life capacity is well over 50Whrs for all-day battery life.

DO NOT purchase laptops with G-Sync, unless you can turn it off, otherwise the dedicated GPU must stay on. Don’t expect more than 4 hours with these laptops, even with 99Whr-batteries.

DO NOT purchase laptops where the discrete graphics are enabled and bypass the integrated graphics. Your battery will die.

Every MILLIWATT counts.

External mice keeps your internal USB I/O controller to be active as it waits for an input from the mouse. In 2021, all laptops should be using Microsoft Precision certified touchpads, which are extremely responsive and handle gestures flawlessly.

The keyboard backlight should be turned off, unless needed in the dark. They generally use between 0.5W-1W of power, which doesn’t sound like a much, but over the course of an entire discharge cycle, that costs over 1hr of battery life.
Avoid port-expansion hubs (E.g. Type C, USB hubs etc) if you can. Some are poorly designed and excessively keep the CPU’s IO controller awake. If the ports of that laptop weren’t enough for you, you shouldn’t have bought that laptop. USB to HDMI converters are an absolute no-no. USB was not designed to carry a video signal, and there will be significant CPU-overhead when used.

From basic, to advanced.

“Disable unnecessary background tasks, services, apps” blah blah blah No. Actually do it. Pressing X doesn’t help. On a few of my friends’ laptop they had all sorts of things in the background, including Skype, Discord, Steam, Intel HD Graphics Control Panel, Dolby Audio, Adobe Creative Cloud, Nvidia Control Panel, Realtek HD Audio Controller, and worst of all McAfee. All in the background. They were complaining about 2hrs of battery life. Manufacturers boast about 10+ hours of battery life, and then they ruin it themselves by preloading garbage on their devices.

Go to Task Manager (Right click taskbar)>Startup.

Disable all the things you don’t need. You should be able to disable most of the things here. The world will not end if Adobe Acrobat doesn’t get its update. Gaming launchers such as Steam and Epic Games Launchers are poorly optimized and chew through CPU cycles even when doing nothing.


All non-Microsoft services should be disabled, unless you specifically need it. Here is a good way to do so:
Win+R, then type in "msconfig" without quotes, then press enter:
Warning: DO NOT modify anything you are unsure of. This may render your computer unbootable.

Go to the Services tab, then click "Hide all Microsoft Services"
Essentially all programs can be disabled, unless you absolutely need it. If your life support depends on Adobe Acrobat downloading an update the instant it comes out, then enable it.
Note: This one-click 'solution' entirely disables the services. If you are worried that it may break some things, set it to 'manual' in services.msc

Some programs also put pesky startup scripts, which are not viewable in Windows’ Startup Folder. They are hidden in Task Scheduler. To view and disable some of these scripts:

Win+R > taskschd.msc > Task Scheduler Library (on the Left side)

Most of these check for updates on startup, and depending on your usage patterns they really bog down your startup times.


Use UWP programs, where possible.

Watching videos? Use the built in Films and TV app in Windows. This video player is far more energy efficient than other alternatives such as VLC. When watching a 720p video, Films and TV used 1.4-1.6W of power, whilst VLC used 2.5-3W (CPU-Package consumption)

Disable eye-candy (Skip if in a hurry)

Desktop Windows Manager (dwm.exe) renders things related to mouse movements, window movements, animations etc. Disabling effects like shadows will reduce the amount of rendering done by dwm.exe.

To do so, go to Control Panel > System and Security > System > Advanced System Settings > Performance Settings and uncheck things you don’t need. Things especially like shadows behind windows and shadows behind mouse pointer are so useless and I never even knew there were such shadows until I discovered this ‘Performance Options’ window.


This will result in the dwm.exe service (The process that draws windows) using less CPU


HIPM+DIPM+DevSleep (important)

Host-Initiated Power Management (HIPM), Device-Initiated Power Management (DIPM), and Device Sleep (DevSleep/DevSlp) are power saving features of almost all modern hard drives. DevSleep is only available on SSDs, and generally puts the SSD into a sleep function than uses >5mW. That being said, your motherboard needs to support DevSleep. By default, Windows only enables Host-Initiated Power Management. To change this:

Win+R > Regedit > HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\0012ee47-9041-4b5d-9b77-535fba8b1442\0b2d69d7-a2a1-449c-9680-f91c70521c60

There should be a Description that says ‘Configures the LPM state’, as well as an ‘Attributes’ DWORD with the value 1. Change the value of ‘Attributes’ to "2,” as per this image:




Now go to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options > Change plan settings (of your active power plan) > Change advanced Power Settings > Hard disk > ACHI Link power Management and set it to Lowest. If that is not an option, change it to HIPM+DIPM.


Additionally, in the same subfolder, change the value of "Attributes" to "2" in these folders:
d3d55efd-c1ff-424e-9dc3-441be7833010
d639518a-e56d-4345-8af2-b9f32fb26109
dab60367-53fe-4fbc-825e-521d069d2456


And play around with these settings:

Try lowering these values (but not to 0ms) and you may see differences in your C7/C8 states. the ACHI Link Power Management especially may be beneficial. My laptop does not have a NVMe drive so changing the nVMe settings do not change anything.

As a side effect, on some systems, such as my older Aspire V Nitro and Mi Notebook Pro, enabling DevSleep and DIPM allowed the Package C State to enter C3, using 2.1W of power on idle. Previously it idled at C2, using 2.4W. Modern mobile CPUs should idle at less than 0.5W, however. (Tested on U, Y, and HQ CPUs) More about C states below.
EDIT: It seems that more people are benefiting from this than I thought. Give it a try and measure idle power consumption using ThrottleStop .


Undervolt (EXTREMELY IMPORTANT)

You can reduce the voltage of your CPU, making it use less power. This increases battery runtime and reduces temperatures. There are plenty of guides and explanations out there so have a look if you aren’t familiar. There are no downsides apart from possibly unstable system if you are lazy or stupid.

I highly recommend ThrottleStop for Intel CPUs, an extremely lightweight but powerful program made my unclewebb and backed by an equally supportive community. Download here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/the-throttlestop-guide.531329/

I do not have any experience with AMD’s APUs, so I cannot comment if there are similar undervolting software.

Extract the files anywhere but your Temp folders, and double click ThrottleStop.exe to start the program. For beginners, this program will be quite intimidating. Tip: Don’t click anything you don’t know about. Search the ThrottleStop thread and your question likely has been answered. In the unlikely event of you mucking up ThrottleStop, delete the ThrottleStop.ini and reboot to reset the settings.
For undervolting, all you are interested in is the FIVR button (Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator). Open that up, and you should see something like this.



Here, you can go undervolt your Intel CPU. Check ‘Unlock Adjustable Voltage’ and move the slider left to decrease the voltage. Here are the estimates for the average undervolt of your CPU. Results vary heavily depending on your luck.

7th gen U CPUs and earlier: -80mV

8/9th gen U CPUs: -100mV or more

10th gen U CPUs and later: -80mV

6th+ gen HQ/HK CPU: -120mV or more

Y CPUs: 50-80mV

Ensure the undervolt is the exact same for both your CPU Core and CPU Cache. One some systems if these values are different the undervolt won’t be applied. To check if the undervolt is stable, run a Prime95, LinX, IntelBurnTest, AIDA64 Stress Test or whatever benchmark and see if your laptop crashes. If it doesn’t, keep lowering the voltages until you hit the point where your system is unstable. Then, raise the voltage by a few millivolts to ensure you have a stable undervolt. Now here’s the fun part: Sometimes a voltage will be stable under a CPU stress test, but will crash when opening something simple such as Edge. If this happens, it means your undervolt is not yet stable so you have to raise the voltage.

On some systems, you can disable TurboBoost and get an even better undervolt. On my i5-8250U, I can only undervolt -140mV with TurboBoost enabled, but can undervolt to -200mV with TurboBoost disabled.

For best results, set ThrottleStop to start on startup. The guide is in the ThrottleStop thread.

Enable Speedshift

Speedshift is a technology available on 6th+ generation Intel CPUs. Basically it is a newer version of SpeedStep, allowing the CPU itself to control its frequency and power states instead of the OS. This reduces the time required for the CPU to raise its frequency and go back to its idle state, reducing power usage and decreasing latency. Intermittent tasks such as loading webpages can see benefits. On some systems, Speedshift is automatically enabled by the BIOS. But on many, they have to be manually enabled. To enable Speedshift:

Go to ThrottleStop, and check the Speed Shift -EPP box. The SST should light up in green. You can choose from a range of 0 to 255, where 0 maximises the CPU frequency at a cost of higher power consumption, but 255 reduced frequency to the point where your laptop may be unbearably slow. 128 is great for a balance, 80 is sufficient for games, and 180 is my value for battery savings. Your mileage may vary.





Check/Enable deeper C States [Intel] (VERY IMPORTANT)

Once again, this is an issue faced by Intel users. I don’t know if this is experienced by Ryzen mobile APU users. Generally speaking, if you have clean reinstalled Windows (without manufacturer image) you may have this issue.

This may be the most effective battery saving tweak in this entire guide if your laptop isn’t configured correctly. Once again, open ThrottleStop and look at the C0% column. Your C0% state in all cores should be less than 1% on idle, if you have been correctly following this guide.


If your C0% is below 1%, then check your package power consumption. Is it less than 0.5W? If it is, you may skip this section. If it is above 1W, and you are certain your C0% is below 1%, then you may have an issue many users face on NotebookReview Forums. Now click this button


It should say CX (C7, C8, C9, etc)

Check that 95% of your cores are in C7. It should be.

Now check your Package C State Percent. This is where the problem lies on a lot of notebooks with incorrect drivers

Over 80% of your package should be in either C6, C7, or C8 state (maybe perhaps even C10!). Is your package idling in C2 or C3? Then you likely have a problem.



I am still not completely sure about what exactly causes the issue, however it is thought that the cause is a generic or outdated disk-related driver. Try updating your disk controller. If you have a SATA based SSD, updating the ACHI controller may work.

Some users have reported success by uninstalling Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST) or installing IRST and disabling a performance related setting. Some users have reported success by enabling IRST SATA power savings.

For me, all I had to do was update the disk controller. Since I have a Samsung NVMe SSD, all I had to do was update the disk driver from a generic Microsoft one. SATA based SSD/HDDs usually benefit from an updated Intel ACHI controller.

My current tablet shipped with a generic Chinese SSD - it may have been a faulty one but it prevented the CPU from entering anything lower than C2 Package. The moment I upgraded the SSD, the system power draw dropped from 3.5W immediately to 2.5 watts. That is a huge improvement.

That being said, it may also be any other driver. Some members have reported that outdated Realtek Drivers for LAN/Ethernet or Wifi and the card reader was the issue. Try updating any driver from its generic Microsoft one.

Alternatively, you can install every driver provided by your manufacturer. They should provide the configuration that allows your CPU to enter a deeper idle C state.

Enabling DevSleep and DIPM appears to also work on some systems. On some systems, adding and removing devices (USBs, etc) change C state residency.

If all else fails, you could try downloading a driver updater utilityAS A LAST RESORT. Update drivers one by one to isolate the issue. Don't pay for a 'pro' version.

After a reboot, your package should idle at C6/C7/C8, depending on your manufacturer and CPU.

Essentially, this is a driver issue most of the time. If you, after many months, have not solved the issue, it may be down to a BIOS/EC/hardware fault. Search around if anybody else has the same issue, and if they do, GET IT RETURNED ASAP W/ FULL 100% REFUND. Don't put up with manufacturer garbage.

Some users will notice that, after connecting various devices (Thunderbolt/External Display, USB devices etc) your computer will get stuck in C3, instead of C8. If this issue still remains after you disconnect the device, see if a sleep cycle resolves this issue. This is likely a BIOS bug - something that manufacturers unfortunately can never be arsed to fix. Return the laptop, if possible. Don't put up with manufacturer crap.

ALL 4th Generation Intel Core CPUs and later should idle at less than 0.5W.
Thank you to @ONjA for the following tips:

"
- In case, your PC is stuck at C2, C3 and 'powercfg -energy' report says there are USB devices without selective suspend - you can force them to use it:
either by VID/PID or simply:
find 'SelectiveSuspendEnabled' under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB\ subkeys, changing 0 to 1 (or 00 to 01) forces it on.
After you forced Selective suspend, check Device Manager and enable "Windows can power down this device" for USB devices.
I can even force it for my mouse and it forces mouse off after about of 2 secs of inactivity.
I forced it on for problematic devices (touchpad in my case), and can achieve C6/C7 package state now with 0.3W package power. (I7-6700HQ)
"


Advanced Advanced Power Options (Meh)

There are many hidden power options in Windows. These require the Attributes value of each key in Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings to be set to 2. After running the script below, you should see a plethora of settings enabled in Advanced Power Options. You should be interested in the processor settings. Each device is unique – one some systems some settings don’t do anything. You should find your optimal value in each setting.
Download Script here.
https://gist.github.com/Nt-gm79sp/1f8ea2c2869b988e88b4fbc183731693

Intel Graphics (relatively important)
As terrible as intel integrated graphics are, they use a tiny amount of power.

Right Click Desktop > Intel Graphics Settings > Power
Edit: In the UWP version/after Windows 1809: Go to Start, then type in Intel Graphics.

And change all the settings to be Maximum Battery. Be sure to enable Display Power Saving Technology and Enhanced Power Saving Mode. Lord knows what that does, but it reduces power consumption of my laptop by 1W by (presumably) reducing LED brightness and reducing contrast. If you are a graphics designer then maybe don’t enable this.
Consider enabling panel self-refresh, etc.

Enabling Panel Self-Refresh can help, especially when displaying still images.


Fan
With high end laptops featuring multiple fans, they can use 1W of power even on their lowest speed. Try editing the fan profile of your laptop. This can take hours to find the correct settings, and most people give up. On some laptops it is very difficult. Very few manufacturers allow users to control their fans but recommended third party fan controllers include NoteBook FanControl. I’ve spent over one month reading hundreds of pages of datasheets and still haven’t figured out how to control my right fan.

Each laptop is different, and I suggest searching google for the resources or spend hours, days, or even months trying to find the appropriate registers to control your fan. Most laptops don’t need this, but I find that it is completely unnecessary to have a laptop fan running when the CPU is below 45C.

Physically disconnect devices you don’t need

Did you know you had a second hard drive? Both my friends didn’t. Another one knew, but it stayed empty.

If you aren’t regularly using your second hard drive, consider removing it and putting it into an external enclosure instead.

According to various datasheets, 5400RPM Hard Drives use 0.5-1W when spinning and idling, but most high end 7200RPM drives use upwards of 1W

Disabling the drive in Device Manager won’t work. The HDD might spun down, but the hard drive circuitry will still draw power, between 100-300mW of power. If you have programs on your HDD which you regularly access, having your HDD constantly spin up and down not only wastes power but puts unnecessary strain on your HDD motor. If you use a program frequently, consider moving it onto your SSD as they are more efficient. Once again, disabling a device in Device Manager disables all the device’s features, including any power saving features. It might still be kept on.

If you have a secondary solid state drives, you might be tempted to think that it does not drain much power. However, you must ensure that DevSleep is supported BOTH by your SATA interface, AND by your SSD. It must also be enabled as well. Use HW-Info64 to check. Alternatively, use BatteryInfoView to measure your system idle power consumption, both with and without the SSD. The difference should be negligible, because SSDs use <50mV in DevSleep mode.

Increase the longevity of your laptop battery.

Every time you recharge your battery, you lose a tiny bit of battery capacity. This is an unavoidable effect of using any battery, and most laptop batteries are rated for 300-500 cycles before their full charge capacity drops below 80% of their design capacity. For example, after 500 cycles, a 100Whr battery will only be able to hold 80Whrs. The battery used in your laptop is based on the Lithium-ion chemistry. Tips for extending battery longevity:

Do not keep it plugged in 100% all the time. Lithium Ion batteries in laptops are generally charged to 4.2 or even 4.4v per cell to maximise battery runtime. Unfortunately, prolonged exposure to voltages above 4v (about 80%) per cell results in permanent capacity loss.

Don’t store your laptop in warm conditions. 20C is ideal, but during operation the inner case temperature of a laptop can reach 35C. This is unavoidable, short of moving to Antarctica or using your laptop in a fridge, but high voltages and high temperatures are the absolute killers of lithium ion batteries. Don’t store your laptop in a car on a hot summer day.

Similarly, don’t constantly drain your laptop down to 0% if you can avoid it. Full discharge cycles put strain on the laptop battery. Laptop batteries do not require full cycling. This is actually very damaging to Li-ion batteries. It is better to have very small charge cycles. Aim to keep your battery capacity between 20% and 80%.

Physically disconnect your battery if you can. Unfortunately, on increasingly more modern laptops with embedded batteries this is no longer possible, in which case you are out of luck.


When not using the laptop, aim to store the battery in a cool environment in a 40% state of charge. This keeps each li-ion cell to a nice 3.7-3.8v.

As far as I'm aware, Lenovo and Microsoft are the only mainstream laptop manufacturers to offer a "charge limit" - in Lenovo, this can be changed in the Lenovo Vantage software.

TLDR: Keep battery capacity between 20% and 80%. Keep battery cool. Store in a cool place at 40% when not used. Don’t use it if you don’t have to.

Antiviruses
Depending on your usage of computers, antiviruses may be more of a burden than a help. If you do not need an Antivirus software, don't use one. You do not need a software to be monitoring your every activity and every file you download.

Do not: (VERY IMPORTANT, PLEASE READ)

Do not disable your dedicated graphics card. When you disable the graphics card, you disable every feature… including Nvidia Optimus or AMD Switchable Graphics. Instead of being completely off and using (theoretically 0W), your GPU will be constantly on but idling and unable to do anything. This consumes an extra 3+ Watts depending on what dGPU you have, which is huge. Some laptops disable Optimus completely, which results in drastically reduced battery life. Don't get those laptops.

Do not lock your CPU down to 400MHz, or whatever the lowest operating frequency point of your CPU is. This makes your laptop slow and inefficient.


Using powercfg
By entering "powercfg -energy" in an elevated (administrator) command prompt, you get a nice report outputted as C:/Windows/system32/energy-report.html


This highlights major energy problems that Windows can find. Try solving these issues. Devices can be identified here by entering the device Vendor and device ID.

Miscellaneous

For users with a dGPU, ensure that any monitoring software (e.g. HWInfo, AIDA, OpenHardwareMonitor, esp. MSI Afterburner) is not waking up your dGPU to poll the sensors. At an idle desktop, your dGPU should read 0.0C temperature. MSI Afterburner, for example, is known to keep the dGPU "awake" and not enter "Optimus", causing drastic battery life losses. MSI Afterburner developers know this and have expressed no intention for solving this issue, stating that MSI AB was never intended to support laptops.


Please post your experiences after following this guide including which worked and which didn't, as well as which settings were optimal for your device. I only have 1 primary device to test everything on and it'll be nice to compile a list of the best settings for each tweak for the community.

I hope this guide has been helpful. Good luck!

Edit: Please DO NOT ask for help without providing screenshots, or at least a list of what you have/haven't tried. It is impossible and unreasonable for anybody on the forum here to be able to help somebody who says "My C state P

 

Psst! 1 GHz = 1 billion cycles .

I completely forgot all about those Intel graphics settings, mine needed an adjustment. I'm glad they offer 1 profile for AC and 1 profile for DC.

I am also unsure if some of the core parking details you mentioned are 100% correct- but again, it's late lol. I would recommend Core Parking as an easy utility with a simple GUI to handle your core parking details. It's made by Bitsum who also makes Process Lasso- both excellent applications.

Also, many laptops these days are much smarter and sophisticated about not thrashing your battery into oblivion when it comes to over/under charging and staying on AC- but your overall points are valid in general.

Also when it comes to stability testing an undervolt I find I can run an undervolt that is too deep for real use no problem with many of the stress tests. It is actually when you start/stop the tests, open/close chrome with a ton of tabs, or jump between performance profiles on TS or Windows power options that it will crash.

 

Great guide.

I have my nVidia GPU disabled on my Dell XPS 9550 when using large Virtual Instruments. This reduces DPC latency considerably as the nVidia drivers are sloppy.

 

Amazing Guide.. this will surely benefit those who don't know about it

I gotta admit & say it honestly.. I know more than that.... which is... [UNLOCK YOUR BIOS!!]
but I'm sure not everyone can unlock it but.. just saying

Thank you again for your time & effort to make this guide all of your information I know about it and maybe more I already done that for like .. 2 years ago but when I checked again.. I saw everything is already done but I forgot that I did it I guess I squeezed every single bit of performance & battery saving on my laptop

Well.. thanks for refreshing my mind at least

 

Thanks for the guide. But there are things you need to know about disabling services for W10. The ones you listed doesn't have any imapct on system performance at all. Print spooler is used by 3rd party apps as a service to print pdf or xps files so disabling it will give fuzzy images or text on paper or pdf.
Instead of those services, put these services to manual or disable them:
BITS, WU, delivery optimisation, connected device and telemetry, connected device platform, Shell Hardware Detection(Set it to Manual)
As for browsers and UWP apps I use FF Qunatum with tons of tabs and addons and battery life doesn't take a hit at all. I have AV running in background, still I get 7-9hrs+ of battery. I didn't try MS Edge.
Switching off HW acceleration in VLC will improve battery runtimes or set your video preference in Settings App.
As for optimal HDD power usage, I recommend turning on IRST power save link mgmt in IRST SW to get most battery life on 7200rpm HDDs.

 

@Che0063 One more thing, I didn't compile any script I merely posted the link. So, give all credits to the user at github.
My ISO has the script integrated.

 

ok I will try this

 

Gah! I'm back to only having C3 as my deepest state now... WHY DELL WHYYYY?!?!!

EDIT:
So it turns out my machine won't go deeper than C3 if I have my external monitor plugged in via HDMI. (-_-) I thought it might've been related to changing intel graphics drivers (they were only officially for Win7/8) last night when I OC'd my displays.

 

HDMI uses dGPU. Use TrayDpwr or something to reduce power consumption.

 

I will have to look into that, thanks!

 

Che0063, thanks for a great guide. Yes, it made a clear improvement for a battery life of my laptop (over 50 %). Thanks.

 

@Vasudev is there a way to translate this thread to my Linux Ubuntu install so it gets better battery life too?

 

Firstly, migrate/upgrade to 4.13 kernel on LTS version of Linux, secondly install TLP. Reboot and install Powertop.
Open a terminal, type

Code:

sudo powertop --calibrate

Run that code separately on AC power and DC power to get optimal performance and battery life.
BTW, I got Linux kernel 4.15 on Xubuntu 16.04 and am using linux firmware deb file from here https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/linux-firmware_1.173_all.deb

 

anomaly post

something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.

 

Heeeeeellllllllll no! 59Hz is bad enough. Besides isn't that what self refresh is for?

 

I'm running at 75Hz w/o any reduction in battery life at all.

 

well lighting pixels drains battery life.
lighting them half as fast improves battery life hence
my ux 330 gained 2 hours, but it lasts over 12 hours....

so yeah it might not improve it much if your lifespan is 2hours.


edit so i just cross checked my own decent suggestion...

looks like the only way to tell is with battery bar pro and the like

i just did i quick test and the draw was a minimal change, could have been a coincidence i was getting 2 hours more...or well not sure....batterybar pro shows on average 2000mv less when idle...during usage its around 10mv less.



so if your idling your laptop alot its a good suggestion, and if you plan on actually using it im sorry and retract

 

Panel Self Refresh is really made to reduce power consumption on the computing side of the equation not really the display side per say. Now a great side effect is the display using less power but not nearly as much as if you just reduced the backlight.

 

Ok so ive tried about everything in your guide but my XPS 13 9370 (i5) just will not go above C2 states. I tried Driver Booster to update all the drivers, set the AHCI to lowest, used throttlestop with SpeedShift (180), the whole nine yards..
But no matter what, I have a package of over 80% on C2 and never above it.. Any idea? I havent found a solution on the forum in any of the XPS threads yet..

 

Two Three Couple of things I'd like to note here:

1 - Not sure whether disabling some of the "eye-candy" would bring advantages. Most notably the "Show window content when dragging". I find this one in particular to be very useful, and unless you're dragging windows 24/7, it won't make a noticeable hit on battery life. Maybe a couple of milisseconds at most?
2 - Disabling Touch Keyboard services broke typing on Edge. That's weird. Maybe UWP use that service
3 - Turbo boost has one nifty feature, other than "free overclocking": It puts the processor in a very speedy state, in order to finish a task quickly, then return ASAP to idle mode. IIRC, there has been some papers that proved that short bursts of high speed, high consumption beats low speed, low consumption on battery life and long term energy consumption. I'm not sure whether disabling it would be good for battery life.
4 - The battery serves as a filter for current peaks and noises. The PSU does a great job at that, but these systems are designed with a battery in mind! I'd strongly recommend to NOT remove the battery, even if it's dead!

Also, I envy whoever can have a C0% state lower than 10%. All my computers float that value between 8 and 15% randomly, for no apparent reason. PKG Power never drops below 3W



I've never managed to get it low nor my Y50, neither on this Ideapad 320.
Maybe it's the default Windows Update drivers, who knows. I'll try updating them all and see what happens

My battery life range between 3~3:30hrs with this laptop, with light use. Doesn't help to have a puny 30Wh battery.
I've done most of your tips, let's see if it improves something.

 

Thanks for your feedback.

30Whrs for a laptop battery is downright unacceptable. I will absolutely refuse to buy any laptop that has any laptop batteyr capacity of less than 50W.

30Whrs should get you 4-6hrs, really.

 

@Che0063 I agree 30Wh is too small.
@GTMoraes Maybe 3.30 hrs is great on 30Wh battery. I use firefox and battery life was good like I posted in previous pages lasting around 6-9hrs+ with -10-15W usage on 5GHz band WiFi and BT turned off.
You can uncheck speedstep,C1E and check off speedshift for greater perf. and battery life.

 

It's a joke, really. And there's even not enough room to install a larger battery. My old Y50 had a 54Wh battery whose connector is physically compatible with this Ideapad (and the Y50 battery still holds great), however it's proportionally longer and won't fit.

Thankfully, the battery on this thing holds long enough for everything I do mobile. Or long enough so I can get to an outlet
btw the charging cable on that thing is comically small. Like 1,5m or so, and the charger isn't your conventional cable-charger-cable, it looks like an oversized phone charger. I had to make an extension so I could use the charger from a reasonably far outlet.

Lenovo loves to put good hardware paired with absurd hardware.

Isn't C1E good for battery life? I thought it was a power saving feature.
​

 

Not at all used on modern chipset acc. to unclewebb and speedshift takes over for enhanced battery and performance.

 

If you want low idle (C0%) you need to tame your windows processes and services as well as your additionally installed programs, and their services and tasks.

 

EDIT: PCI Express Link State Power Management needs to be set to Maximum Power Savings on my system. It doesn't affect my Passmark CPU or GPUMark score.

 

In high perf. mode, PCIe power savings are OFF.

 

Exactly. By default the high performance power plan disable Pie power savings.

After all these years I finally now know.

 

Pie?

 

Yes, Blueberry is my favorite... although Key Lime and Banana Creme are nice too.

I disable them rapidly through consumption.

No matter the power plan, it's always good to go through the Advanced settings and check the default settings, I enable things / disable things in each - defaults don't suffice. And, in Windows 10 it sounds like every Update resets settings and you need to recheck *all* of them, everywhere.

Time for my Blueberry Pie...

 

I seriously doubt MSFT would do that. I haven't seen that ever. But W10 resets everything when it upgrades to new OS.
Then again thanks for the heads up!

 

It's not a new OS, it's a new Update... Point Release at best, it's also like when installing new drivers you need to check settings.

Every update has some new driver or update that reset's settings.

If you don't know what's changed specifically enough to check just those settings it's best to double check everything. Especially if you notice performance drops or battery run-time decreases.

 

Wow..just came across this and I am impressed with how much tweaking can be done.
I have a question:
How does he know how much watts each app is using?

 

What do you mean? They are just estimates

 

OK.I was just curious where you got the statistics but good guide by the way.

 

Hi all.
Thanks Che for your guide.
Followed all the steps, but I think a problem definitely remains ...
With this post I join a picture of Throttlestop, taskmanager and batterybar pro ...

I have a Razer Blade 14 from 2013. Latest Windows 10, new drivers installed, no bloatware etc... I disabled all useless programs, services etc.
My processor (i7-4702HQ) can't seem to go idle, with C0% on one or 2 cores > 5-10% all the time, with minimum 3.5W package power draw.
And C7 state seems unaccessible - it stays on C2-C3...
I have the latest Intel ACHI controller compatible with my chip (14.8.0), DevSlp enabled, updated SSD drivers, power saving power plan, undervolted 90mv ...

I only kept a few programs running in the background (BitDefender, Razer Synapse (but disabled the useless game manager etc..)) but disabling them doesn't seem to help anyhow. Also I have 2 SSDs, with programs loading from either C or D. Can that be the issue ?

Overall that gives my laptop an ~13k to 17k mW discharge rate, which is definitely worse than the ~9mW I used to get. The package power drop to from 4W to <1W should do most of the trick.

Any idea on how to help me get this C7 ? Btw unfortunately I can't change anything in the BIOS, but C7 should be enabled I think. I remembered seeing it for a few secs while reinstalling the ACHI driver, but that's it.

Thanks in advance to whoever can help, and wishing everybody a happy sunday.

 

You didn't actually disable all useless services - The Nvidia Control Panel is still running happily. Unless you need it, you should probably disable the Nvidia Display Container in Services.msc
It appears there's a Dolby thing in the taskbar... do you need that?

There is a possibility that the second SSD is causing issues - try booting windows with one SSD only. Try updating/downgrading the ACHI driver with the manufacturer provided drivers. Is your dedicated GPU on but not doing anything?

???

If you saw it for a few seconds, why don't you try uninstalling the ACHI driver?

 

Hi. Thanks a lot for your quick answer.

Not sure if I saw C7 during ACHI or Intel Chipset drivers installation. Anyhow, I reinstalled both of them - with generic then latest driver - and didn't get the chance to see C7 that time ...
I disabled Nvidia Container (which I left on purpose, it's just the services that allows display of the Nvidia notification icon but anyway let's try), and I disabled Dolby as well (which is quite handy actually to watch movies for a better sound (basses, voices...)).

I tried disabling Intel integrated graphics (HD 4600), but it actually made it worse and the CPU was stuck on C2 (no more C3).
My dedicated GPU (Geforce 765M) is enabled in device manager, but off thanks to Nvidia Optimus. I tried disabling it once but it makes consumption worse, as you rightfully wrote in your "do not" section.

I'll try removing my second SSD tomorrow, but not sure that will be the issue actually, as I remember those -9000 mV while having both the drives.
Here are a few more screenshots of my computer at idle with barely nothing in the background, save Bitdefender/Opera (writing this message) and processes with 0% CPU usage.

Maybe my CPU can't access C7 but it's Haswell so it should.

 

Can your C0% go any lower? On your second screenshot you have opera in the background. I see you have cores 3 and 4 parked, but your C0% percentage is way too low to be fully idling...

 

Hi everyone.
Thank you Che for your fantastic guide.
I am following your guidelines and it's working beautifully.
However,I have a few questions:
1.I saw 2 NVIDIA Container and a few Dolby Audio services in the background. Should I disable them because I still use NVIDIA control panel and Dolby to improve sound quality.
2.I search my Intel control panel but have none of the settings in your screenshot. Can this be from using a generic driver other than the manufacturer-provided one?And also when I try installing the generic one,a popup appears and said that the driver is not compatible to my laptop and I had to force it through Device Manager.

 

1. They slow down startup, but if you use them then don't bother disabling.
2. No, you should see the settings regardless of what driver it is. Could it be an incomplete installation? It's ok if the generic driver says it is not compatible, most people force it through Device Manager anyway. Most modern laptops should have the obev settings.

 

I looked at the settings and there's no such thing you mentioned in the OP.

 

Then perhaps your display doesn't support such options. BUt that is unlikely. You should be able to change the stitgns for the plan. Idk, the onlyt hing I can suggest is a clean reinstall of a drivers using Driver Driver Uninstaller (DDU). Thaht's rare, and I've never seen such issues.

 

Maybe I should go back to the OG driver from the manufacturer?
But the Optimus stuttering issue as far as I am concerned isn't fixed completely and you have to use the latest drivers from NVIDIA and Intel to fix it.

 

And also I have like 4 Realtek HD Audio Background process on startup and I have disabled them.
Should I?

 

Hi Che and all,

I eventually ended up cleaning everything, by formatting my C: drive and reinstalling Windows.

I now get even lower C0 and higher C3, but still no C6/C7 (image below).

I ran an energy-report to see if something was messing, and indeed 2 errors appeared (see below) : a USB composite wont enter selective suspend (but I suspect it to be linked with keyboard and trackpad since uninstalling it disables those two), and ASPM is disabled due to a known incompatibility.
Those two already existed with my older Windows.

Could it be them that prevent the deeper C-States ? Not quite sure since ASPM is used when the d-GPU is being used, which is not the case while idling. Also, uninstalling the USB composite won't change the C-States in throttlestop.
And I don't know how to re-enable ASPM (tried looking on the web but nothing worked out so far).
Btw, if info on my computer is needed, I have a Razer Blade 14 from 2013 and the BIOS is locked with no options regarding C-States/ASPM or something else.
I posted a thread on the Razer section of this forum to see if someone can help.

So what could definitely be the issue ? Maybe Razer didn't unlock C6-C7 but they seem so on Throttlestop, and I definitely remember getting -7-9k mW discharge rate, while now I can't get below -12-13k mW. Pretty annoying.
Could it be a recent Windows update ? I'm not quite sure but I remember getting way lower discharge rate a few months ago, with nothing new except the Spring Creators Update.

Thanks again for your help,
Regards,

 

Just installed this program made by Microsoft, Joulometer, and it says this (if it can help) :
what is base power consumption ? CPU seems way too low and base quite high, and definitely not possible on a laptop with a 70k mWh battery that used to have 6hours of battery life (not dreaming, I checked old reviews from 2013 to see if I overestimated it).

Hope I'll find what is wrong someday... going from 4 to 6 hours of battery would definitely help me for my work.

 

Dear Che,
I have ssome questions:
1.What are C-states and which is the best for battery life?
2.Can you do a guide on Advanced advanced power settings you mentioned in this guide?
It's so confusing and frustrating.
Thanks beforehand!

 

C states are a power saving feature on modern CPUs. They range from C0 to C10. C0 is when your CPU is fully on. C10 is where it is basically 100% off. For most (99.9999%) of laptops, C9 and C10 will be disabled due to manufacturer laziness and instability. Entering and exiting each deeper C state takes longer and longer. If you force 100% of your CPU into C10, you'd have a non-functioning computer, because all of the transistors would be off. There is lots of information on this online, and it is something you can easily google.

Those "Advanced" advanced power settings are very confusing and frustrating for me too. The best thing to do is trial and error and see which works for you.

I'm actually considering removing that section, because I don't think it helps very much. It just makes the guide more difficult.

 

How to fix the goddamn thing that my laptop keeps jumping a lot of percentage to C2 instead of C8 under very light workload(Edge with one Youtube tab at 1080p and two other tabs,including this website) and also consumes like 10-14mW on such loads(around 10%-20% CPU usage).
I was using the iGPU at the time,even enforcing it inside the NVIDIA Control Panel.And my fans are at 0 rpm.