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I have a Lenovo laptop (few months old) with Windows that is only used on weekends. It's kept unplugged during the week; when turned on after 5 days, I notice it looses about 25% of its charge (e.g this week it went from 80% to 55%)

Is this an acceptable value? It seems a lot to me.

And that's after doing a few things that somewhat alleviated the problem (the discharge was even greater before):

  • turned off "Hybrid Sleep" under power management
  • turned off wake-on-lan under network adapters
  • turned off "Always ON USB" in the BIOS
Bruno Rino
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2 Answers2

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I own a Lenovo laptop myself, and these three things help me extend the battery life when unplugged:

  1. Turn off Bluetooth. If not using this feature, disable the feature to avoid draining the laptop battery.

  2. Shut down or hibernate the laptop rather than using standby if there are no plans to use the laptop for a while. Standby continues to drain energy to keep the laptop ready to go when the cover is opened.

  3. Use the power management settings on the computer. In Windows, click Power Options under Control Panel. It is strongly recommended to select Optimize for Battery Lifespan mode or Conservation Mode and keep the AC adapter connected all the time. This mode will enable the battery to be fully charged to 80% or 60% of its design capacity.

Ramhound
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Julio Rivera
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Battery discharge on a turned-off system should be a fraction of that. If you consider that a disconnected Lithium Polymer charged to about 60% can last months without falling below 40% at room temperature it indicated. Wikipedia has a table showing self discharge of various types of batteries - and bandies a rate of 2-5% per month depending on type.

This DNKpower.com page talks about 0.5 - 3% per month (which seems more realistic to me).

I wonder if you have a bad cell, and the other cells are wasting their power trying to top it up. One thing that may indirectly help you would be to do a battery test under Windows and see its capacity relative to rated capacity. As a very general rule you would expect a laptop to loose about 20% of its rated capacity after 2 years. If your battery is showing less then 90% state of health that could indicate a bad cell and could explain your problem. (Of-course, it is not impossible that there is parasitic draw going on from your laptop but that would be laptop dependent, and I would argue a bug)

davidgo
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