I’ve had my FW13 for near over 18 months now and have loved the experience! Aside from battery life… For the life of me I can’t figure out how to get reasonable endurance out of my battery. Using HWInfo 64 I’ve established that my power consumption at idle after a fresh boot is anywhere between 8-12W at minimum brightness and essentially not ‘doing anything’ on it. Generally, doing most activities, it’s sitting around 20W - which accords with my experience of generally not getting more than 2-3hrs out of a charge. At this state, CPU usage is sitting around 10-15%.
So… to me this would seem to be excessive consumption or a very poorly performing battery. I’ve read around a bunch of different community posts and it seems that most people were having issues with battery life under Linux rather than Windows. I’ve looked at some guides on improving battery life with Windows also, but I find it a bit untidy that we would need to edit registry entries, modify startup programs, etc, etc. Is it really the case that Windows is that poor on power optimisation? Or is there something else possibly wrong with my setup?
I’m getting a 20% battery drain per hour on my Laptop 16 on normal Windows 11 23H2 install doing non-intensive work. Given that the battery is 85Wh, this means it consumes 17 Watts on average during that time. But this is on a more power hungry chip, and the screen is bigger with brightness at 50%. So 20W is way too high of an idle power consumption for a 13" laptop, IMO.
It is definitely exessive power usage. My setup is FW13 AMD7640U, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 2.8K display, Win11.
I get maximum 7h+ youtube video play (the higher the resolution the less it is). Tipically HWinfo displays 8-11Watts
If I just read static webpages I often get more than 10h+. Sometimes battery report displays 13h+. In such cases usage falls slightly below 5W.
When sitting and staring and the screen without doing anything it sometimes falls below 4W.
Realistic usage is between 6-8 watts without youtube videos, 8-10 with.
All this is with the most energy efficient setup, dimmest display (though it does not make that much difference) within Win11 with very little registry hacks, not sure if they made any signifcant difference.
With the 61WHr battery it is just at the edge of all day battery life, with 72-75WHr one it would be the optimal.
It is important to note that I close apps if I don’t use them so nothing much running in the background for me.