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

2013-09-27T21:31:02+00:00
Hi Chris,

Im not sure if you were planning on doing the 8.1 upgrade but if you have already or done it on a preview edition but the "powercfg /sleepstudy" command should help get to the bottom of your problem. It will show us what is preventing the machine from entering DRIPS.

On the off chance you have already installed 8.1 can you post the html file from sleepstudy up here?

Thanks,

Chad
1. From my experience, "updating" windows is a bad idea, if you use it as a work environment. It just messes things up. And since my tablet is a work machine, I'm really reluctant to update anything. "If it werks - don't update". No, seriously. Except for antyvirus/security stuff.
2. Doing a clean install is better for the OS stability imho, but that's an incredible waste of time reinstalling software and reconfiguring tons settings - for a poweruser. I can do this with my android phone in 5 minutes thanks to apps specifically designed to move user and app data between various roms, but on windows, this is a complete pain in the ... If you know a method to do this with a snap of the fingers, enlighten me.
3. I've been reading reports from people on atom windows 8 tablets, installing windows 8.1 and checking it out. If they had power issues before, sometimes issues disappeared magically, sometimes they got much more worse. This is russian roulette for me.
4. So basically the prospect is to waste even more of my time testing MS newest OS, instead of maybe installing ONLY the new powercfg? New powercfg wouldn't work on windows 8.0? Lots of dependencies for a few MB sized command line utility?
5. If I can somehow just use the new powercfg, yeah, no problem, I'm very curious myself for the result. But I'm not gonna risk another complete mess with my toy just to save 5% on the battery. I'm using this device daily work, so you know...
Anyway, thanks for the hint. Probably sooner or later I will have to clean install win8.1.. what a mess that will be.. backup the old system image, install new os, install apps, spend a nice few hours reconfiguring everything the way it was... hunt down possible issues.. If it wasn't for onenote and office, I'd be on android. Titanium Backup and Clockwork Recovery FTW. I would soooooo buy this if there was a windows version...
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Anonymous

2013-09-27T20:12:10+00:00

Hi Chris,

Im not sure if you were planning on doing the 8.1 upgrade but if you have already or done it on a preview edition but the "powercfg /sleepstudy" command should help get to the bottom of your problem. It will show us what is preventing the machine from entering DRIPS.

On the off chance you have already installed 8.1 can you post the html file from sleepstudy up here?

Thanks,

Chad
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Anonymous

2013-08-06T17:41:17+00:00

I've found a freeware (PowerSlave - http://www.polychromenz.com/businesssoftware/polychrome-products/powerslave/ ) program that allows to FORCE power plan change (powersaver, balanced, high performance) on windows 8 on intel atom clovertrail devices ("connected standby"-enabled) - like Ativ 500T. Remarkably, this app can force change even though this ability is disabled by default by windows 8 if it discovers it's installed on a tablet pc. I thoroughly enjoy having taken the power back!

It looks like there's lower battery drain during connected standby sleep while on powersaver on my device, but I'm also using another utility which might by partly responsible (ParkControl -http://www.afterdawn.com/software/system_tools/system_tweaking/parkcontrol_32-bit.cfm ). It allows to tweak CPU parking (temporary core shutdown) settings. It turns out, by default on win8 on clovertrail, the 'balanced' power plan has NO CPU parking. All cores stay on all the time - according to this utility. Which I think is a waste of power, especially during low-resource tasks or sleep.. So I used this utility to enable CPU parking on either of the powerplans I'm using at the moment. There are 32 and 64 bit versions of ParkControl.

I suggest allowing cpu parking on only 50% of your cores on intel clovertrail - if you go 75%, you're shutting a whole physical core (two logical) and one logical from the other physical - I don't know if it's safe and don't wanna check with my very own device - because from what I see, cores can only shutdown physically (2 together) and not logically (1 separately)...

Both are "legacy" apps - won't work on windows rt.

My connected standby power drain figures are like cut in half with CPU parking enabled, powersaver, airplane mode (I shut down wifi just to be sure it doesn't suck the juice...), windows 8 notifications/live tiles off (my android phone does push mail better anyway, without juice drain).

This has also been posted on tabletpcreview forums in my connected standby power drain troubleshooting thread - http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/windows-8/56912-sleep-wake-connected-standby-battery-drain-issues-possible-solutions.html

For the sake of anyone who's fed up with connected standby battery juice issues and has the same problem I have ever since the last bios update on ativ 500T...
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