How I stop iCUE's stupid, crazy battery drain on my Legion laptops

Here is an easy way to stop Corsiar's iCUE software, the RGB lighting app used on the Legion 7, 7i and many older Legion models such as the Y740, etc, from draining your battery. If you don't know, iCUE from Corsair is an absolute CPU and thus battery hog. If left running, it can reduce your battery runtime in half, heat up your laptop quite a bit and interfere with the smoothness of Windows as well as slow down other CPU intensive processes. See this youtube video from Jarrod's Tech that shows this in painful detail.

You can safely install iCUE v3 or v4 and run it to create your preferred RGB profiles with static colors for any or all zones (static color profiles are ideal as custom animated RGB profiles will halt animating when iCUE is stopped). You'd then make sure your favourite customized RGB profile is the first in the iCUE profile list as that'll be the one that gets activated upon iCUE startup. From there you can create a batch file like below, create a shortcut to it (right click - create shortcut then rename it "iCUE Battery Saver", for example), customize that shortcut via its properties (right click - properties), add a shortcut key combo (such as setting it to CTRL-ALT-Z), set it to run minimized and, optionally, set it to run in Administrator mode. Finally, move or copy the customized shortcut in to your Start Menu's Programs folder (%AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs).

From then on, you could either click to run this from your start menu or tap the keyboard combo you created from anywhere in Windows (except with full-screen apps or games activated). Doing this will auto-kill the running iCUE v3 or v4 process and its services while leaving the loaded RGB profile activated if using iCUE v3 (until reboot or hibernation). If you are using iCUE v4, it'll revert your RGB lighting to the stock firmware "Rainbow", but iCUE will no longer effect your battery or stress your CPU. If running v4, I'd suggest running this batch/shortcut every time you unplug from AC, then run iCUE again, if desired, once you plug back in to AC. You could even modify iCUE's own shortcut from your Start Menu to add it's own key combo, say CTRL-ALT-C, to allow quick access anywhere in Windows. Using v3 of iCUE is preferred as, again, your custom, static RGB lighting will remain active even if iCUE and it's services are terminated (until reboot or hibernation). If your Legion 7 or 7i doesn't have any stuck RGB LEDs while running iCUE v3, this would be the best option.

Here's a simple icue_killer.bat file one might create:

Code:

@echo off
echo.

:: Terminate the iCUE 3 or 4 process if running
echo Shutting down Corsair iCUE:
taskkill /IM "iCUE.EXE" /F
echo.
echo.

:: Stop the three Corsair v3 services (and one more with v4) if running
:: - the first process requires admin mode to stop, the other three do not
:: - the last process is the one that consumes the most battery
:: - you can get away with not running this in admin mode if desired
echo Stopping the Corsair Gaming Audio Configuration Service:
net stop "Corsair Gaming Audio Configuration Service" /y
echo.
echo Stopping the Corsiar LLA Service:
net stop "Corsair LLA Service" /y
echo.
echo Stopping the Corsair MSI Plugin Service:
net stop "Corsair MSI Plugin Service" /y
echo.
echo Stopping the main Corsair Service:
net stop "Corsair Service" /y

One could use Windows task scheduler to automate this by running these commands when AC power was unplugged, then have it start iCUE back up when AC power was restored. There are lots of other ways this could be changed, customized or automated but this simple example works fine.

Takeaway: this may not be elegant, but it at least fixes this problem until Corsair gets off its ass and re-writes their terrible software (after all these years!). I wish Lenovo would sever their Corsair relationship once and for all and code RGB control directly in to Vantage, but alas. With this batch and shortcut, you can still have iCUE installed to take advantage of all the RGB goodness on these beautiful machines (again, static color profiles only as custom animated RGB profiles will halt when iCUE is stopped). A simple and easily accessible keyboard kepress will stop iCUE from destroying your battery life and even avoid stuttering in Windows for some non-gaming tasks. When you want iCUE back, just run it again.

Best to you all.