Friday, February 11, 2011

High power usage in sleep mode

I've now gotten into the habit of switching the laptop into sleep mode overnight before unplugging it - it lasts overnight and is obviously much quicker to start in a morning. Power usage in such cases has been around 15% roughly 1% per hour.

Imagine my surprise this morning to see my battery down to 5% - what happened?

The only difference I can think of is that I left both Windows Mail and Firefox open when it went into sleep mode. Oddly this morning rather than both programmes being there Mail had to start up and Firefox displayed it's crash recover session screen just as if the computer had unexpectedly restarted. Yet there was no BIOS boot up or resumption from Hibernation just the standard log in screen I see from Sleep.

Any one any thoughts?

[Update - happened again. I've looked at the Event Viewer and it woke up at 3am to install some updates and reboot several times - nice]

2 comments:

Unknown said...

My theory is that updates are sometimes forced in both sleep and hibernation. I.e even though auto update is turned off on everything, mine also appears to have been quite active overnight.

FlipC said...

Hmmm doubly suspicious in that it wouldn't have a valid internet connection that night; unless it was trying to find an update?