I have a couple of portable devices around me both at home and at the office, and probably as everyone else – none of these devices are charged when you really need it!
Recognize the scenario? You have your surface lying at home using it every once and a while and when you pick it up, it’s almost always out of battery.
I have a small tip for you to save battery when you don’t use the device and but still want the battery be as it was when you left it. The trick is to put the device to hibernate and not to sleep, normally when you close the lid or just leave the device lying it will go to sleep until there is no battery left and then it will automatically put your device to hibernate to save your information.
What’s the difference between sleep and hibernate? A short summary:
Sleep will still consuming battery and will leave all information in memory, depending on the device and configuration but let’s say 1-5 W. But when you wake the device from this state it is super-fast!
Hibernate will consume zero battery. Depending on the operating system it will handle the state a bit different, but in general terms information in memory will be saved to a hibernate file on your hard disk and when you wake the device it will load the information from the hibernate file into memory. So waking the device from this state will take longer time and this time depends on how fast your computer is, how much memory you have and what type of hard disk you have and the speed of it.
Back to the point, you can change this behavior, let’s say that you want your device to hibernate after 30 minutes of sleep.
The manually way
Click the battery icon at the bottom right and select Power & sleep settings
Set the computer to go to sleep after 15 minutes
And another tip is to disable connected standby, at least on battery. Just uncheck On battery power, stay connected to Wi-Fi while asleep
Click Additional power settings and for the currently selected Power plan click Change plan settings
Click Change advanced power settings and simply change Hibernate after > On battery to 30 minutes
That was the manual way of doing it, but there must be another way? No, there are 3 other ways…
Powercfg to change the current plan
Powercfg.exe /setdcvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT 238c9fa8-0aad-41ed-83f4-97be242c8f20 9d7815a6-7ee4-497e-8888-515a05f02364 1800
Or with alises
Powercfg.exe /setdcvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_SLEEP HIBERNATEIDLE 1800
Group Policy Setting
Create a new Policy for Power plan settings and browse to the setting
Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Power Management\sleep Settings\
Specify the System hibernate Timeout (On Battery)
Group Policy Preferences
So instead of using Group Policy settings it is possible to use GPP and this is where you find this Preference
Computer Configuration\Preferences\Control Panel Settings\Power Options
To disable Connect Standby
Unfortunately I didn’t have a connected standby device beside me to verify the options to disable Connected standby with powercfg and group policy, but there is a registry you can use to disable it. Simply change the key from 1 to 0 and restart.
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\CsEnabled = 0
More information about Connected standby can be found here
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn481224(v=vs.85).aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn495346(v=vs.85).aspx
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