Battery draining while notebook is asleep?

I have an Asus K54C notebook running Windows 8.

When I put the computer to sleep, I find that it takes only a few hours for the battery to drain almost completely--to the point that I have to plug the machine in just to turn it back on. The same thing happens if I put the machine into hibernation. Sleep and hibernation drain the battery very rapidly compared to other computers I've had.

I have tried two different batteries but had the same problem with both.

If I shut the computer down, the battery does not drain.

Why might this problem be happening, and how can I solve it?

 

Sleep and hibernation modes will always drain your battery. If you don't want it to drain the battery you have to turn it off...

 

This is the first laptop I've had whose battery drains so quickly during sleep mode. It shouldn't be draining from a nearly full battery to a nearly empty one within six hours. The waking battery life is about three hours.

 

No. While in Sleep Mode, the laptop will keep part of the motherboard powered, in order to maintain the content of its memory, for example. However, in Hibernation Mode, the laptop should be turned off entirely: What the machine does is write its state to the hard drive, and then turn off. While in the hibernated state, you should be able to unplug the laptop and remove the battery, for example, with no ill effects. If your laptop drains the battery in Hibernation Mode, then something is wrong.

When your laptop wakes up from hibernation, does it display the "Resuming Windows" screen?

P.S.: I just saw that this is with Windows 8, which handles hibernation quite differently than previous versions of Windows. In that case, no idea why it does what it does. Even Windows 8 is supposed to turn off the laptop entirely while in hibernation, so there's still something wrong. However, with Win 8, I can't help.

 

Pirx is correct. Hibernation is akin to shutting the system down altogether, with the exception that the contents in RAM is saved to non-volatile memory (e.g., the disk drive), then the system powers down completely. So your laptop should not be pulling anything from the battery during hibernation (but from sleep, yes).

Do you hear the system actually power down when you set it to Hibernate? Do the fans stop, LEDs stop emitting, etc.?