Battery draining when laptop shut down?

Question

I have had this problem for a few weeks now, tried a few different fixes that I have come across online, nothing seems to work so far.

I have attached part of my battery report, which shows the battery at 100% when turned off, then 2% next time I turned it on.

Now I can see the issue myself, is that it says suspended. I assume this should actually be stopped.

I guess the issue is that my laptop is only sleeping when I shut down. I have tried to reset power options, change them, etc, but this problem seems to persist.

I have a Dell Inspiron 11 3000, if that's any use. It's about 2 years old, and the battery report seems to be fine in terms of actual battery health.

Solution

As you appear to have concluded, 'suspended' is not the same as 'powered off'. Depending on how the firmware implements this 'suspended' state, quite a lot of the system may actually be powered on (in fact, if it's an ACPI S1 suspend, most of the system is probably still powered on, but that's unlikely for a laptop since most of them use ACPI S3 as the basis for suspend).

As far as fixing this, try:

1. Disabling 'Fast Startup' in Windows. This option is in with the options controlling what power buttons do, and can cause all kinds of weird behavior regarding shutting off the system (the two best examples I have are a laptop that would reboot whenever you tried to shut down when this setting was enabled, and another that didn't turn off the system completely when it was enabled).
2. In an administrative command prompt or PowerShell session, try running powercfg.exe /h off This will forcibly disable hibernation, and that may kick Windows into properly handling shutdown. You can run the same command with on instead of off ot undo this change.
3. Make sure you're letting the system shut down completely before closing the lid. On some laptops, there is no way to avoid it suspending if you close the lid, and that may be what's happening.
4. See if you can find something about 'Intel Smart Connect' in the BIOS settings and disable it. This is a 'feature' that allows the WiFi adapter to wake the systme periodically to allow the OS to update state when a registered network is nearby. Just like Windows 'Fast Startup', I've seen systems where having this enabled causes odd behavior relating to shutting down the system.
5. See if there is a setting in the BIOS regarding supplying power to USB devices when the system is off. Names for this vary, but usually mention something about power sharing or charging. If such a setting exists and is enabled, that may also be a culprit. I'm pretty sure most Dell systems have this setting.

Comments

[Ramhound]

If you laptop is suspending itself, then it means, you are not actually are shutting it down. It also is not sleeping. Sleeping and Suspension are two different power states. So is your device going to sleep (uses battery power) or being suspended (does not use battery power)?

[Theo Wright]

when i shut the laptop down, either in the start menu, or by pressing the power button (which i have configured to shut down) the battery drains itself overnight i cannot hear the fan or any sound from the laptop however and during normal use, the battery holds the power fine

[Ramhound]

You wouldn't hear the fans in either state. However if the device was in a sleep state it would still draw a small amount of power.

[Theo Wright]

As per the battery report above, the battery drained almost completely overnight, in it's suspended state?

[erg]

Just want to add, this is probably the most annoying issue with Win10. I have this problem on a HP Laptop, a Lenove Thinkpad and also now on a Surface Book 2. Never had an issue like this with Win 7, now on all models the same: Do a Start -> Shutdown, put the laptop aside, turn it on a few days later: Sometimes everything is fine, sometimes battery is down to 0%. None of the fixes mentioned (fastboot, wake-on-land, etc.) solved the issue.