Nova 15.6 Battery life

[JP92]

Hi all,

I recently bought a Nova 15.6 desktop replacement laptop. It's going great so far bar the poor battery life (1 hour) but I knew this when ordering so cannot complain. Just looking for opinions on any dos or don'ts in terms of keeping the battery healthy considering I will have the laptop plugged in 95% of the time? Should I be removing it when using for prolonged periods or will the power supply have no effect on the battery once charged? Any comments much appreciated.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Hi all,

I recently bought a Nova 15.6 desktop replacement laptop. It's going great so far bar the poor battery life (1 hour) but I knew this when ordering so cannot complain. Just looking for opinions on any dos or don'ts in terms of keeping the battery healthy considering I will have the laptop plugged in 95% of the time? Should I be removing it when using for prolonged periods or will the power supply have no effect on the battery once charged? Any comments much appreciated.

Personally, what I do is leave the battery in at all times. But when the laptop is powered off, turn off the charger at the wall. I found that leaving it on charge at all times reduced battery life over time.

Other than that though, just try to keep the battery from being in direct sunlight or near a heat source, heat will also degrade battery life.

And always worth disabling hybernation on any laptop, gets rid of a large hyberfil.sys file which takes up space on the c drive, but also helps protect the battery.

To disable hibernation, open cmd prompt as admin and type "powercfg.exe /h off" without the quotes.

 

[JP92]

That's great advice. I'll take that on board cheers Spydertracks. 👌

 

[FerrariVie]

Personally, what I do is leave the battery in at all times. But when the laptop is powered off, turn off the charger at the wall. I found that leaving it on charge at all times reduced battery life over time.

Other than that though, just try to keep the battery from being in direct sunlight or near a heat source, heat will also degrade battery life.

And always worth disabling hybernation on any laptop, gets rid of a large hyberfil.sys file which takes up space on the c drive, but also helps protect the battery.

To disable hibernation, open cmd prompt as admin and type "powercfg.exe /h off" without the quotes.

A bit hard to keep the battery far from a heat source, as it is quite close to the CPU

I don't have complaints about the battery life, 1 hour or a bit more is ok for me. However, I'm also a bit worried about degradation, as I can feel the palm rest (where the battery is located) quite warm when gaming, even though CPU is below 80° and GPU below 70°.

Is there any way to prevent the battery from charging 100%? Like keeping it at 85% at maximum? That proves to keep batteries healthier for longer and I have no clue on how to do that on this laptop. On my old Dell, there was a power management software that you could set up those battery settings.

 

[Bradden]

Just wondering regarding the hibernation advice. I currently set my laptop to hibernate rather than sleep as I thought this used less power. From what you've said I may be doing it wrong though. Would you recommend sleep over hibernate?.. or using neither.

Thanks

 

[ubuysa]

Just wondering regarding the hibernation advice. I currently set my laptop to hibernate rather than sleep as I thought this used less power. From what you've said I may be doing it wrong though. Would you recommend sleep over hibernate?.. or using neither.

Thanks

Sleep uses more power than hibernate. The only downside with hibernate is that it needs a lot of disk space.

TBH with a fast SSD as your system drive you really don't need sleep or hibernate.

 

[FerrariVie]

Sleep uses more power than hibernate. The only downside with hibernate is that it needs a lot of disk space.

TBH with a fast SSD as your system drive you really don't need sleep or hibernate.

I agree... whenever I'm not using the laptop for 30min or so (and there's nothing running on the background), I just turn it off. Waiting 10 seconds to boot from scratch is not that much of a problem to me.

 

[hogfish]

I notice that you had "no operating system". The nvidia GPUs are especially power hungry and the device
drivers need to do a lot of work to keep the power consumption down.

Are you by any chance using Linux? If so, are you using the closed source nvidia drivers, or nouveau?
If nouveau, there has been a good deal of work on thermal management but it has to be reverse engineered
given nvidia's hostility to linux. It may be that if you update the nouvea driver, you might see reduction in
power consumption.