Connected Standby Problem – How To Check It’s Working via the Hidden Windows Battery Report

Here’s some information about how you can access a very cool battery life report on Windows, check your connected standby figures and potentially fix your problem. I hope you take the time to contribute your report or thoughts in the comments below too.

Powercfg battery life report on Windows 10

Here’s how to get a battery life report on any Windows 10 device. This also works for Windows 8

Hit the windows button to get to the start screen / modern UI and type cmd <return>
At the prompt type:

powercfg -batteryreport

You’ll get a response within 5 seconds that a file has been created. Open that file with a browser and enjoy the stats. At the bottom you’ll find the average figure for your Windows  PC.

Example Powercfg battery report

Here’s my full report from the W510.  Look at this snapshot below. The annotated green section shows in-spec Connected Standby drain figures. The red area shows out-of-spec CS figures. (These results started after I installed V2.04 on the 2nd Feb.  I installed V2.08 on 14th Feb. 2013)

Look at the useful summary in the last section of the report. I’ve highlighted good and bad CS figures.
On the left you can see real-world in-use figures too. Yup, I’m regularly seeing over 10hrs n the W510 with the dual-battery.
For comparison, my Toshiba Z830 Ultrabook returns 3hrs 51mins average now which would be 4:28 with a new battery.

2018. Lenovo Mix and standby.

Microsoft changed the name of the Windows 8 / 10 standby feature to Modern Standby so that’s what we’re seeing here. More information on Modern Standby.

My ‘Fix’ and Other Notes

In this example with an old Acer W510 I managed to fix a problem.

After some testing it’s appears that it’s WiFi that’s draining the battery although the cause of the problem could be elsewhere; a process preventing the WiFi from going into sleep, for example. I don’t think it’s the drivers because after what could have been a simple reboot yesterday, the device used just 2% off battery in an 11hr Connected Standby period last night. I’ll have to wait 24 – 48 hours to see if the problem is ‘fixed.’

The interesting thing is that all the Clovertrail tablets I have used have almost the same hardware build and are likely to be using the same drivers. There’s a chance that problem goes beyond just the Acer W510. It’s time to get some crowdsourced information from you so we can get to the bottom of this.

Post your Powercfg Reports

Please run the powercfg command above and post a link to a snapshot of your results in the last section of the report. Alternatively, just post the last line of the report, the summary,  and include the device name and measurement period.

Are your battery reports for CS within spec?

• Under 5% per 16 hours with no background tasks
• My W510 was reporting 4-6% / 16h  with background tasks
• Up to 10% / 16h would seem to be acceptable
• Constant radio streaming could take this up to around 15% / 16 h
• Over 15% drain per 16 hours could be regarded as suspicious but I’ll update this as we see results from users below.

Obviously larger battery means slower % loss. I have a total of about 54Wh on the W510. The Samsung Ativ 500 has a smaller battery, 31Wh AFAIK.

If you think you’ve got a connected standby problem.

If you think you’ve got a problem here’s a few things you can try.

1. run powercfg /energy as administrator. You’ll get a report with issues highlighted.
2. Make sure you reset your battery power profile to default settings.
   
3. Make sure your PC is not waiting for a Windows update reboot. This could be preventing some standby features. “Update and Restart inch via the settings charm > power button.
   

Of course, check the comments below for more tips. I’ll update this post if anything significant comes up in the discussion.

Connected Standby is an amazing feature but when it doesn’t work as expected it could catch you by surprise. I do expect laptop batteries to drain a lot if I leave the device running overnight but I don’t expect to wake up to a dead Acer W510. Keep an eye on your battery performance by regularly running the powercfg battery report.

For more info on measuring battery usage, see this good article by Intel , a must read for all Windows developers in my opinion.