Power usage and excessive fan kicking in when running off battery

J

Jerrym0

Background **


For decades from the mid 70s to the late 90s I worked in the IT industry and for a Good time specialised on Operating Systems from those.


running on huge but simple ferrite core non disk based systems to the bloatware of windows. I even wrote 2k room basic interpreters for Z80s and contributed to early iunix windows OS on various platforms.
by 21st Century it was management , IS security and then a return to my engineering roots in as al Development Engineer for a large Corporate mainly mechanical but included engine control modules.


*Tl;dr ** below


I recently bought my first non work PC in over a decade , favouring Android / Linux on the personal front. I wanted a large format tablet with oomph that allow me to could read books outside and inside and some tabletop hobby stuff which also required video capture, editing and live upload. Vorpal, Twitch, youtube etc.



The Journey


It soon became a portable radiator and though it performed well the battery drain at an alarming rate and the fan ran at high levels constantly.


I ruthlessly culled start apps and uninstalled stuff I would never use and disabled apps/services to little effect.

I run some Ethernet based WD 2TB drives for backup, picture, video and embedded apps (plex) and cloud storage localisation, which meant I didn't need one drive, box, Google drive...... apps running on my tablet but could still access the data easily and fast , 1gig Ethernet locally.


The battery improved but not by much so I went looking for advice and tips , lots of great ones some I recognised from experience tuning Windows servers and desktops pre 8.1, regenerate cache, set windows to performance mode (switch on the fonts just turn off all the features that only impact for a second but eat power) , all easily found on-line better but still something was wrong. In addition to all the solutions surrounding rogue apps and hardware drivers.


In my 60s I had a computer that in my 20s would fill a school gym which needed powerful air con, now the same components ; Arithmetic processors , multiple processors linked memory , on and offline disk storage , PLUS high definition screens, camera and sound system, that consume a few Watts as opposed to 100s of kilowatts


What my experience taught me was to produce heat and consume battery code was running and the most efficient computing requires you only run what you need to do the task, all the huge processing , memory and storage has meant performance tuning is almost irrelevant, almost...


I started analysing task manager and noticed services a I had switched to manual or even disabled were running ... even form programs I wasn't using or hadn't since rebooting, I checked updates and on the surface nine had taken place , they are normally the culprit for resetting services etc. Its always code even if it had developed AI its still code so it was stealthy code it was background code....



**Td;lr


I went through every app in settings , easier than navigating the registry , hit advanced settings and turned background apps off for all but the mail and a few others e.g. discord.


Rebooted and vast improvement even when the fan kicks in its at a low level..


I suspect the background processing is not just updates but data capture or the official 'malware' we are burdened with and corporates like Microsoft and Google enable and benefit from.

To generate that much heat and power drain it means he OS is not reporting the cumulative impact of 20+ programs background processing and obviously not just locally but linked to hosts all over the world. Personally I think they exclude background stats from task manager and performance reporting for non foreground programs , which includes all the browser tabs and multiple files open in programs from pdf readers to Chrome.

Continue reading...
 

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