Forum Discussion
Windows 11 Battery draining while shutdown
Tarek89I am facing the same problem. New HP laptop Spectre laptop. WFH hence connected all day, every evening I shutdown and in the morning it's about 50% battery drained. Weekend it goes to 0%. I have the fast startup and hibernation options disabled. This is really annoying as will always need a charger around.
My 4-year-old Surface book 2 still keeps most of the battery charge about 1-2% drain overnight in shutdown. I used to manually drain the battery (use on battery till 5%) once a month to keep the battery healthy.
SShindeI had the same problem. I had already disabled "fast startup" and all the other BS that Microsoft made default, and I was still draining battery after shutdown. I first tried disabling the ability of things to wake up the PC when sleeping. (Although it is pretty insane to be able to wake a computer that is SHUTDOWN. Kinda goes against the whole definition of shutdown....) That DIDN'T WORK. I also tried unplugging all USB devices from all ports while it is shutdown. That also DIDN'T WORK.
Finally, I did a troubleshooter on the power. It showed a nice bar graph of my power declining while my computer was supposedly shutdown and I was fast asleep and all devices were unplugged, even the mouse. The troubleshooter showed one application ,"Lockscreen", eating 80% of all the power in the last 12 hours.
Apparently, that stupid "active background" that shows you different pictures on your lockscreen and FORCES YOU to go to BING on EDGE (no matter what your default browser is or your default search engine) if you are careless enough not to click in exactly the right spot on your screen to get the login prompt to appear, is the culprit.
Fortunately, you can turn that monstrosity off and make your lockscreen background a fixed, unchanging picture or pattern. Once I did that, my power drain problem disappeared.
It seems that the stupid "active background" must be hitting the internet or frantically redrawing the lockscreen even when you are not ON IT or even have the computer running. Does it have some sort of dedicated screen memory, that is being accessed and updated even when that screen is not active? If that is the case, then the Microsoft engineer that wrote that code is a true idiot. Also, if after a year, Microsoft can't figure this out and send out an update to fix it, then what does that say about the quality of their engineers? I am computer literate, but certainly have never written an operating system or touched the sacred internals of any binary programs. I am lucky to keep my Linux PC's working. (Many distributions of a great Operating System, BTW, to run older hardware with security fixes after MS abandons you. I recommend Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and Zoren.)
Fortunately, the MS engineer that wrote the troubleshooter had a little sense, or I would not have had a clue.
Unfortunately, this has not made any effect on my battery drain - it must be something else.
I have switched to a static image for lock/log-in screen - still ridiculous battery drain overnight when I switch off the power to my charger and shutdown Windows 11. THIS NEEDS FIXING WINDOWS- Eventually, I have found my fix. I needed to disable USB charging in the laptop BIOS. This prevents charging when the laptop is shutdown.
I now do not lose charge when trying to save the planet and shut-down at night.
