Question Do any modern laptops actually turn off?

[mrbillium]

I was researching a new laptop and looking at problem posts for various models and found a recurring complaint that the laptop battery lost 2-4% of charge overnight when turned OFF.

The more I looked the more I found and according to ecocostsavings.com the average for laptop OFF is 0.34W

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So, who cares about a small loss?

Well I am the the kind of user that wants a small laptop for occasional use on the road maybe 4-6 trips per year.
0.34W drain means that a fully charged ultra book with a 43WH battery will be dead in 6 days!
Even taking the lower 4% per day number means the battery will be dead in 25 days.

With my use case if I charge the laptop when I get home then it may sit at zero battery for4-8 weeks which is bad for longevity

Is this just how it is and I need to charge my new laptop ( with non-removable battery) every week to make sure the battery does not get damaged by sitting at zero for a long time?
Or do some laptops still have a real Off switch?

I understand that Laptops need the ability to wake-on -<something> but assumed that they could still turn hard OFF unless listening in wake-on mode.
I have an old tablet that stays charged for 4+ months of being OFF

Am I missing something?

 

[Colif]

They may use fast startup which leaves them in a hybred hibernate state where they still need a little power, that could be it. Win 10 has feature, its unclear if its on by default on win 11.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/4189-turn-off-fast-startup-windows-10-a.html

If you turn it off, the pc is actually off on shutdown

 

[Lafong]

it may sit at zero battery for4-8 weeks which is bad for longevity

How sure are you that sitting at zero is bad for longevity with today's batteries?

I'm kind of in the same situation with cell phones. I rarely use mine. If fully charged and not used at all, it will be discharged within about 2 weeks.

I generally don't try to keep it fully charged. If I think I will be using it quite a bit in the next few days, I fully charge it the night before. Otherwise, I just let the charge run down.

 

[mrbillium]

They may use fast startup which leaves them in a hybred hibernate state where they still need a little power, that could be it. Win 10 has feature, its unclear if its on by default on win 11.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/4189-turn-off-fast-startup-windows-10-a.html

If you turn it off, the pc is actually off on shutdown

Sounds reasonable but many of the threads about this problem go to great lengths to turn off fast startup, USB wake, registry tweaks, try different drivers etc - yet the problem remains.
Drivers should only matter if something is still running .

So, I am wondering IF laptop do still have an OFF chip or are they relying on commands to CPU, Drive controller, Wi-Fi card to go to deep sleep so there is a small but finite power draw all the time.

 

[mrbillium]

How sure are you that sitting at zero is bad for longevity with today's batteries?

I thought it was generally accepted that you should keep batteries between 20 -80% as much as possible. and that 0% was the worst spot to be for a long time.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Rolling up my two cents about this topic and what's been said so far:

The article's "Off mode" includes the charger plugged in
Meaning they probably used something like a Kill-A-Watt to measure the power consumption, which means the charger was in the loop. The article says itself what they called "Off Mode"

When the charger is plugged into the laptop, power is consumed. This is the “Off mode” mentioned above, where 0.33 watts per was being consumed.

Chargers need to consume some power because there's circuitry in there that has to detect that something's plugged in.

Are laptops fully off?
No, they're not. The battery circuitry is always on because something needs to control the charging when the laptop gets power. There may be other things in the power delivery circuitry as well because something needs to tell the laptop to power on when the button is pressed. This is similar to desktop PCs: the PC isn't fully off unless you flip the hard switch. Something has to tell the PSU to actually start delivering power to the computer

EDIT: Should also add any portable device with an real-time clock likely pulls from the main battery, as opposed to using a coin cell one. So that's sipping power too.

About Fast Startup
This doesn't consume any extra power because the contents used to make Fast Startup... well fast... resides in the storage drive. It's basically a special version of Hibernate.

Leaving the battery at 0%
Yes, it's actually not a good idea to leave a battery discharged. If a battery drops below a certain voltage, it's basically dead. No amount of charging will get it to hold a charge. However, a battery reported at 0% is not actually empty. It still has some charge left in it to keep the battery circuitry up and running. So eventually the battery will drop below the unrecoverable threshold. This is also on top of the fact batteries simply self discharge over time.

However, when the point of no return actually happens is up in the air for me. Though Nintendo put out a statement back in late 2020 saying to charge your devices at least once every six months, so we can go with that. Although that's more to prevent the battery from degrading faster than usual. I've had devices that I haven't charged in years and they'll take a charge, but I'm sure they won't last as long as they should.

How to store a device if it's not going to be used for an extended period of time
Keep the battery around 40-60% and in a cool temperature, like around 18C/65F. While the colder the better, you shouldn't freeze electronics. Hotter will definitely make the battery discharge faster and degrade it faster.

On aside note, I have two laptops that are usually off. They lose about 1-2% a week.

 

[mrbillium]

Here is an update on my findings:
I did some more research and pulled the trigger on a new Lenovo Ideapad.
It appears that laptops use a Power management IC (PMIC) to handle charging and act as the power switch. So they CAN turn the power off but there are several optional modes they have such as Always on USB and wake on (something) that when enabled would prevent the chip from actually powering down.
My new Lenovo does not appear to consume any appreciable amount of power when turned off for extended periods with no power-requiring options turned on so I think it is really turning off and should last many weeks without power
It also has a neat feature to optionally limit charging to 60% allowing it to be left plugged in forever without hurting the battery.