Poor battery life in Windows

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I know this is a very common question, but I’ve looked at so many threads and scoured the internet and couldn’t find a solution.

I have a Framework Laptop 16 with the Ryzen 7, dGPU, 32 GB of RAM, a 2TB 2230 SSD (both from Framework), 1 USB-C, 4 USB-A and 1 audio expansion card.

In order to optimize battery life I enabled just about every power saving feature I could think of, set the display to 60Hz, tried both VariBright on and off, even changed my power plan settings in the registry, most notably set the CPU max performance state to 25% to only use 4 cores and park the rest. With this setup, in a good scenario, I can get my idle power draw on battery to about 7.5W, with 11W during light use. I used the laptop like this for a couple hours so I know it’s a possible feat.

However I’m having an issue where most of the time the power draw will inexplicably climb to 17-20W without me doing anything, and stay there permanently. I’ve confirmed it’s not the CPU or iGPU doing anything abnormal, the CPU stays at the same 1-4 watts and low usage as during 11W use and the iGPU draws the same 4 watts all the time with little usage. There are no power hungry processes or system services manifesting themselves in the task manager either. I tried enabling airplane mode to check if it’s the wi-fi adapter acting up, but it doesn’t seem like it. I enabled every single power saving feature there is for PCI-E, nework adapters, usb, disk drives with no result. I even did a clean install of Windows 11 and the issue persists. It seems like Windows is just not letting a certain device in the system sleep. My only guess is that it’s the internal USB controller, as I did powercfg /energy and it said that the Root USB Hub couldn’t go into selective suspend. I made sure that selective suspend is enabled in the registry and in my power plan, made sure all of the USB devices have the “allow this device to sleep” setting, but to no avail.
Additionally, powercfg /requests shows no processes or drivers hogging the battery.

At this point I’ve tried everything I can think of, and it seems like no information online can help me solve this. It is especially frustrating that I don’t have this issue in Arch Linux where it stays at 11W during light use and never climbs randomly like Windows does, which probably suggests it’s not a firmware issue.

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Windows does house cleaning and upkeep when the system believes it as at idle. Some of this it does even when on battery. It is an annoying thing. You can lock it down using some group policies and disabling some services, but by and large MS keeps it elusive.

You can try disabling indexing as well.

I would recommend that you not park cores but rather limit all of the cores. I think this will be more efficient in the long run.

Anyway not much help, but maybe a little helpful.

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I can’t recommend Atlas OS enough. It’s been super stable for me and battery life jumped to 7-9 wifi browsing hours. It’s advertised as “gamery”, but I find it is more of a glorified Windows debloater. Give it a try!