Incredible battery drain during connected standby on a clovertrail windows 8 tablet

Anonymous

I'm experiencing infuriating battery drain during "connected standby" on a windows 8 tablet, Samsung Smart PC 500T. I bought it 2.5 months ago, the problem has been on for over a month, after some big OS updates from MS... I've tried to diagnose it any way I can, but this it it, thank you, not interested in this all connected standby thing, don't want to be a guinea pig anymore. I just want to disable it.

So - how to disable connected standby? Don't tell me "it's a part of windows experience" bla bla, the 'experience' is half baked so far...(to put it very diplomatically). I want to shut connected standby down, completely - and use good, old, normal windows 7-style sleep. Is there a service, registry key, anything i can do to disable connected standby?

On connected standby, I've got battery drain with airplane mode, no user apps open (anything that can be shutdown - shutted down), most metro apps deleted, just 4 left (metro IE10, Windows Store, Music, Photos, S-Camera), no nfc, no bluetooth, no usb accesories, no keyboard dock, all task scheduler stuff not only not allowed to wake the computer, but disabled at all, no auto syncing anything in widndows 8 (not syncing tiles, user account stuff, no push mail in outlook 2013), no auto updates to OS, anything (except for samsung own s-update service - it's fine, it's been long before and it didn't cause problems), no anytvirus, windows defender disabled..

Nothing interesting in the event viewer, with anything power-related filtered from the system logs..

I mean, man... What the ....?! How to find this something that drains my battery? I've been looking at cpu cycles (task manager and ProcessExplorer), and it's not conclusive, the most cycles is OS stuff.. some "hardware interrupts and DMCs", but not nearly enough to cause such drain...

I'm suspecting wifi drivers a little bit.. some weird logs I've seen in the even viewer.. But I'm going into connected standby <on airplane mode>. Wifi off. I even checked, I disabled the wifi driver in the device manager and still, battery drain on the connected standby

Yes, I'm all over updated. I'd even say updated too much from MS... This been working fine before.

Some powercfg -batteryreport (s) in the links below. Yup, played with powercfg /waketimers, device manager power and wake settings, powercfg /devicequery wake_armed (all turned off, nothing here from a loong time) and powercfg -requests. Clean.

On these pictures from powercfg -batteryreport, the columns are date/type of activity/lasted for how long/battery drain in %/battery drain in mWH. Suggesting you have a look at the last one. It's a record there... 18% battery drain in 4 hours. "Sleeping".

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=7A6A0144117F1D94!4203&authkey=!AGOahveLemD-xPs

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=7A6A0144117F1D94!4202&authkey=!AAKbhNhOulPIJC0

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=7A6A0144117F1D94!4201&authkey=!ABIvfMzCdX_dGOY

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=7A6A0144117F1D94!4200&authkey=!AGqKhL79akGQZDg

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=7A6A0144117F1D94!4199&authkey=!ABwMBny0RuCTFnM

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=7A6A0144117F1D94!4232&authkey=!AEVUq9rlcLGg_4Q

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=7A6A0144117F1D94!4231&authkey=!AGAoUOoE7n091iE

The tablet is lying on my desk, just sitting there, doing I've got no idea what, and 4 hours later boom, where all that battery juice went for?! I've got problem with the windows home button, it gets triggered in my bag accidentaly when I carry the tablet around, but it's a separate problem how to disable this windows home button. The connected standby battery drain is a different thing.

Much worse.

So:

QUESTION 1:

how to disable this crappy connected standby thing that drains my battery and drives me nuts?

QUESTION 2:

if it's not possible to disable directly, how to go around that? I don't need a button to do this. Telling what to do with windows registry is good enough.

QUESTION 3:

if connected standby cannot be disabled in any way - how to diagnose which app/process uses cpu cycles, battery juice? I've been all over ProcessExplorer and Event Viewer, but maybe you know something I don't know...

And please spare me suggestions of clean boot, when I revert to "normal" state I'll have a ton of bloatware I don't need running with the OS.. there is a reason why a little bit tech-savvy people use such things as services.msc. De-bloating! Nope, I didn't touch the system services.. Yes I know it can cause a ton of problems, it's not this.

I don't need a clean boot, I need a way which device in the device manager uses so much power, what driver, what app, what service, what process, what thread, where it's located in the filesystem, at which times it's been active, how much cycles on the CPU it got since then...

And if MS doesn't already have such app in windows, there should be one, cause power issues on the clovertrail windows 8 tablets are ..... plague. For instance - this is exactly the problem (a review of similar win 8 tablet with the same connected standby issue) here - http://www.umpcportal.com/2013/02/connected-standby-battery-life-problem/

When even bloggers and tech reviews write about it, you know there's something in it.

But I guess stupid finger painting apps like freshpaint are more important as a selling point.

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous

Just to let you all know that I have found the registry key to turn off connected standby. So you can all stop raging and take a sigh of relief.

Go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power. There is a DWORD called "CsEnabled" which you should find set to 1 and changing it to 0 will turn connected standby off.

I have a Surface Pro 3 and can confirm that since making the change my battery life has dramatically improved. Also on the battery meter, previously it just showed the percentage remaining but now it shows the time remaining (e.g 8Hrs, 30 mins) as well.

The only disadvantage of doing this is when I close the type cover and re-open it, the surface logo (normally blue windows logo) appears and performs the old style wake up from sleep. Obviously this should not be a problem for any of you though although as most laptops normally do this..

Previously when I opened the cover, the screen would come back on and I would be back at my desktop (or metro app, whatever was last open) just as before - similar to pressing the lock button on and off on an iPad, tablet or phone.

I hope that this helps everyone all out. Please like and mark as solution if this fixes your problem :D

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Anonymous

I would suggest you update the bios. There's been two recent releases of bios from Samsung for ativ 500t1c. The first wrecked my battery meter and didn't fix connected standby battery drain, the other fixed the battery metter and the drain. After a year from the release of the device. Finally... And it was crappy bios drivers all along...

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50 additional answers

Anonymous

2013-10-02T05:29:03+00:00

That's exactly what I'll be testing over the next week or so (albeit by turning off Windows Update altogether).
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Anonymous

2013-10-02T15:47:06+00:00

Let us know how you go. For what its worth you might be better off updating in case there are updates relevant to your issue. (Even driver updates can play a big part in CS). If you get a chance, you should also consider the store upgrade to Windows 8.1 in a few days. There is a lot of CS specific work in the 8.1 release and it will be really easy to get it installed via the store.
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Anonymous

2013-10-03T17:55:46+00:00
(...)

In the 2nd trace there is information to suggest that the WU (Windows Update) resiliency activator has taken a reference on the Idle resiliency (roughly == scheduler), DAM (Desktop Activity Monitor roughly == services), and IO (roughly == disk) resiliency clients*. The reference is active for 37 minutes in the trace.

* Resiliency clients are the parts that keep us from being completely asleep (and the activators are the components that may take a reference on these - Windows update, Group Policy etc.).

I'm not 100% sure on this, but i *think* there may be an event in your event log to confirm if a Windows update did apply. Sorry I don't have access to my CS enabled device today to check for the event number.

Thing is, I disabled windows update on my machine. No auto scheduling and installing, not even auto checking - I check manually once in a blue moon to see if there's anything interesting besides security updates. Reason one for this, I was suspecting windows update of hogging on the battery. Reason two, "if it werks - don't update". I know it sounds like cheap trolling, but seriously, except for the security updates I need really strong incentive to download new software on my device, especially drivers. Cause solving driver-related issues is a huge mess... on your workstation...

So basically - no, for sure there was no windows update during that trace. And I'm 100% positive there was no 'windows just installed something' information when I woke the machine from connected standby. None. Just normal logon screen. Again - Windows Update is set to work 100% manually on my machine - manually checking for updates, manually installing.

And yes, I've got a bunch of items marked as available in Windows Update, but I'm not going to install anything except for the security stuff. The first of the non-security updates which number I've googled gave me results such as 'update number ...... associated with BSOD on certain devices'. Nah, thanks. I usually wait like three months before the updates 'mature' (ekhm, let other people be guinea pigs..) and only then I might just... consider... installing ;)

So to conclude:
1. I thought I disabled windows update as much as it can be disabled. If it's running in the background and preventing connected standby from working properly - even though I set it not to do so, is there a way to disable windows update even more? Shut down appropriate service in services.msc? Delete C:/Windows? ;) No, seriously. Registry tweaks sound good - if they work.
2. Yes, I've had a list of "available" updates during trace recording - a few weeks old, from the last manual check (today I did another manual check for updates, installed some security stuff and left out the rest). Can it be that even though Windows Update is set NOT to check, schedule and install automatically - but only manually, it can still hog in the background because of that list of available updates? That would be weird.. Oo'
Anyway, that windows 8.1 update coming through the store - glad to hear there's been some work on CS done, however no way I'm gonna be first to install on my model ;)
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