Sleep Mode + Battery Loss

How much battery life should I expect to lose if i let my computer sleep overnight? Earlier this afternoon I put my pc in sleep mode for 1 hour and noticed a 10% decrease (on a brand new pc) so I'm going to experiment tonight on a full battery. Does closing programs before going into sleep mode make a difference?

I'll post my results in the morning.

Thanks.

 

Closing programs does not make a difference. Have you tried Vista's hybrid sleep feature? That may yield better results.

 

Why not just hibernate, that's what I do. Don't use any battery life at all.

 

Why not shut it off...lol.

 

No, it won't be any better... and in fact it'll yield slightly worse results, although the difference may be pretty small.

Hybrid sleep saves the computer's state to disk just like hibernate, and then goes to sleep, keeping the RAM powered just like regular sleep. It's saved to disk so that if power is lost for some reason, you can resume from disk as if from hibernate. The reason it's worse for battery than sleeping is that in addition to sleeping, it has to spend an extra minute or two saving the computer's memory to disk.

Hybrid sleep is mainly for desktop computers without battery backup: http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/help/335c6a5d-0304-4af1-b135-6bf6c124dc111033.mspx

 

Well my battery was at 91% when I woke up this morning. I guess a loss of 9% overnight isn't that bad. And I'll try hibernate tonight.

Btw...is there a way to shut off the blue light that keeps flashing from the power button when it's in sleep mode. It's quite annoying in the dark. I have an Asus F8 laptop.

Thanks.

 

bump...any idea on how to disable the blue light that keeps flashing from the power button when it's in sleep mode? thx

 

RTFM? That's where you'll find out about Fn Keys and features.

 

I did RTM but I must have missed it...will check again.

 

The self-discharge rate for LiIon cells is about 5% in the first 24 hours and as low as 3% per month after that.

Losing only 9% overnight while on standby sounds good to me.

David

 

Thank you Davidfor. It’s comforting to know that all is good with my battery. It’s a new laptop I’m trying to do as much as possible with it in the first week to see if there are any problems. Now if I could only get it to lose 5% while in use . I find that the battery drains too fast. I’ll have to figure out what I can do to use it more efficiently.

 

I put my gateway to sleep every night and when I wake up it's usually around 90%, depending on how long I sleep.