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Help troubleshooting battery/drivers issues

IAmAndre
By IAmAndre
in Windows
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Hi,

 

I recently bought an LG Gram and I'm having battery issues that I suspect are linked to driver issues. So LG advertises 14 -20+ hours of battery life on the product page, and while I wasn't expecting to get these numbers, I'm getting surprisingly low battery life considering its 90Wh battery and low power CPU. The max I was able to get was a bit under 10 hours that was just web browsing. Doing anything else cuts the battery almost in half. For example, I can be at about 60% of battery with an estimated 6 hours left, and see this estimate fall to 2 and a half hours as soon as I start playing a video on YouTube. This morning, I had a Teams meeting for 1.5 hours and the battery went from 100% to 70%, which would mean 5 hours of battery life using Teams only. Okay I had Chrome running in the background and my Bluetooth headphones on, but still.

 

I think that the video decoding process is consuming too much battery. After disabling the Bluetooth, the battery time left went up a bit too. All this makes me think that the Intel drivers for Bluetooth, WiFi, and potentially iGPU need to be updated. My questions are the following:

  • The Intel website shows a message saying that updating the graphics driver might have an impact on all the optimizations made by LG. Should I still go for it or is it risky?
  • I also noticed that there's a process called "searchhost.exe" that's been consuming more bandwidth than Chrome over the past week. That's very odd because I have Chrome running constantly so I'm not sure what this process is, what it's doing, and if this could be the issue rather than the drivers.

Any clue?

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On 1/18/2024 at 11:45 AM, IAmAndre said:

This morning, I had a Teams meeting for 1.5 hours and the battery went from 100% to 70%, which would mean 5 hours of battery life using Teams only. Okay I had Chrome running in the background and my Bluetooth headphones on, but still.

Consider using the advanced power options to limit maximum processor percent from 100% to a much lower number, and try reducing wireless transmit power from maximum performance to maximum power saving.

 

Maybe whatever website is in the background is loading some scripts, is the cpu used a lot by chrome?  Try an addon like NoScript or privacy badger to reduce what is able to load on a website.

 

Try Firefox, it's been around as Pheonix, firebird since 1994.

 

Disable wi-fi at all times, unless loading webpages or downloading.  When a page is done loading, turn off wi-fi.  If you have the permission or are the owner of your wi-fi router, it is set to beam out 10 beacons every second, unless the network is very busy.  Because of this (what I think is a horrendous default setting) all client devices are designed to respond to any and all beacons transmitted from the connected access point.  This can drain the battery of clients faster, although in practice I haven't noticed a difference.

 

Instead of 100 time units, set it to to the maximum of 1000, or nearly one second, and see if you notice a difference.  You can also increase the DTIM to 2, but since this affects UDP packets, try a test voice over ip / video call before keeping the setting.

: JRE #1914 Siddarth Kara

How bad is e-waste?  Listen to that Joe Rogan episode.

 

"Now you get what you want, but do you want more?
- Bob Marley, Rastaman Vibration album 1976

 

Windows 11 will just force business to "recycle" "obscolete" hardware.  Microsoft definitely isn't bothered by this at all, and seems to want hardware produced just a few years ago to be considered obsolete.  They have also not shown any interest nor has any other company in a similar financial position, to help increase tech recycling whatsoever.  Windows 12 might be cloud-based and be a monthly or yearly fee.

 

Software suggestions


Just get f.lux [Link removed due to forum rules] so your screen isn't bright white at night, a golden orange in place of stark 6500K bluish white.

released in 2008 and still being improved.

 

Dark Reader addon for webpages.  Pick any color you want for both background and text (background and foreground page elements).  Enable the preview mode on desktop for Firefox and Chrome addon, by clicking the dark reader addon settings, Choose dev tools amd click preview mode.

 

NoScript or EFF's privacy badger addons can block many scripts and websites that would load and track you, possibly halving page load time!

 

F-droid is a place to install open-source software for android, Antennapod, RethinkDNS, Fennec which is Firefox with about:config, lots of performance and other changes available, mozilla KB has a huge database of what most of the settings do.  Most software in the repository only requires Android 5 and 6!

 

I recommend firewall apps (blocks apps) and dns filters (redirect all dns requests on android, to your choice of dns, even if overridden).  RethinkDNS is my pick and I set it to use pi-hole, installed inside Ubuntu/Debian, which is inside Virtualbox, until I go to a website, nothing at all connects to any other server.  I also use NextDNS.io to do the same when away from home wi-fi or even cellular!  I can even tether from cellular to any device sharing via wi-fi, and block anything with dns set to NextDNS, regardless if the device allows changing dns.  This style of network filtration is being overridden by software updates on some devices, forcing a backup dns provuder, such as google dns, when built in dns requests are not connecting.  Without a complete firewall setup, dns redirection itself is no longer always effective.

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