FWIS3

I have to really watch battery power on my laptop, a Samsung Series 7 Chronos as we charge via solar and have three laptops, a chart plotter, nav lights, cabin lights and a fridge all draining the batteries on the boat.

The laptop battery is only 9% degraded as I've had the battery extender enabled a long time and I got this laptop because it had a 9 hour battery life. The use I get out of it is however more like 2-3 hours.

The reason is that the CPU usage is high. I've tracked this down to windows update. It seems to be consuming about 6-7% all the time. Even on a metered connection. With a few of the other services it needs to run the total is about 12-14%. That translates to about 28Watts total consumption. When these services are not running (exceedingly rare as I manually shut them down and they restart) the consumption goes down to about 9-11Watts, which is would give me the 9 hours that I should be getting.

Anyone know of a way to fix this?

Hmm. On Windows 7, I know that the update mechanism tries to keep lots of large objects in RAM while searching for updates. It hogs massive amounts of RAM, Windows forces it into swap space, CPU usage goes through the roof, and the updates do not get installed in a reasonable time frame.

I think this was supposed to be fixed in Windows 10, but it may have just been mitigated, by combining the former differential updates into larger update packages. Not sure.

But yeah - maybe take a look at swap space utilization. Your laptop should have 6 GB of RAM, so maybe you could disable swap until this round of updates are installed; 6 GB should be enough to manage without an OOM error, I think. And then turn the swap space back on once the installations are finished.

Good luck...

I have 8 gig, I disabled the virtual memory and restarted the machine.
No difference in power consumption.

Next idea?

Never mind, it took a while but the power dropped down to 13Watts and update is no longer using cycles.

Well, it came back on after a while again.
So same problem.

Thanks for trying.

So update still causes issues but I did fix up something that it seems not too many people have thought about.
Ramdisks.

I installed one since the usual objections to having one on a desktop don't necessarily apply to a laptop and the advantage is worth it.
Typical objections are that it uses RAM you can't get back. Well, I never go over about 40%. Ever. So I'm wasting it already and now I'm not.
Another is that it is in volatile space. Not on a laptop it isn't. Objection gone.

Advantage: Hdd activity goes to zero for long periods. This means the system shuts down the Hdd. That saves a lot of power. Less green house gasses etc. Not that I make any since we're on Solar but whatever.

What I did was make the Windows virtual drive store to the Ramdisk. Hdd activity dropped dramatically after a brief burst. So now the laptop power has dropped and my speed has increased since it no longer has to access the Hdd.

I now have to see how to make Chrome save to the Ramdisk instead of C: and that will pretty much eliminate hdd usage for most common tasks.

The ramdisk idea worked great. I moved the chrome cache to it as well and Hdd activity is down greatly, speed is up and CPU usage has dropped (totally unrelated I'm assuming).
So I can now get about 6 hours or so from full charge while using the internet.