Acer Switch Alpha 12 - Horrible Battery Life

Mister-B
Mister-B Member Posts: 14

Tinkerer

edited March 2023 in 2016 Archives

I have had the new Acer for a couple of weeks now and am totally disappointed with the battery life.  Pushing it I can get at the most about 2½ hours before the battery need to be charged.  That is without doing anything challenging for the Acer.  Brightness is at 25% and I'm still losing about 35% per hour.  This can't be normal, can it?  Is anybody else suffering from the same ridiculous battery life?  Apart from this I'm fairly satisfied.

Best Answer

  • billsey
    billsey ACE Posts: 34,246 Trailblazer
    Answer ✓

    Definately not normal. Mine lasts several hours on battery. Start with the normal checks, just to make sure you're not running with full brightness all the time and such, then look at what you have running, constant network activity (such as with bittorrent running) will suck battery.

    Click on "Like" if you find my answer useful or click on "Yes" if it answers your question.

Answers

  • billsey
    billsey ACE Posts: 34,246 Trailblazer
    Answer ✓

    Definately not normal. Mine lasts several hours on battery. Start with the normal checks, just to make sure you're not running with full brightness all the time and such, then look at what you have running, constant network activity (such as with bittorrent running) will suck battery.

    Click on "Like" if you find my answer useful or click on "Yes" if it answers your question.
  • Mister-B
    Mister-B Member Posts: 14

    Tinkerer

    Thanks for the tip.  The energy settings were setup for maximum performance.  I've now tweaked the settings and am getting more acceptable battery time.

  • billsey
    billsey ACE Posts: 34,246 Trailblazer

    Yeah, that Maximum Performance setting is great when you are powered, but sucks big time on battery. Smiley Happy

    Click on "Like" if you find my answer useful or click on "Yes" if it answers your question.
  • adsad
    adsad Member Posts: 1 New User

    When you say "lasts several hours" on battery after tweaking the power/brightness settings, are we talking 3-4 hours or closer to 7-8 hours? Also, did you ever do a bios update? I've heard that it may help this unit's battery life too.

  • prasathvishnu
    prasathvishnu Member Posts: 8 New User

    I got the Acer Switch Alpha 12 core i5 version four days back. Though, I like the display, keyboard and the form factor, I am very disappointed with the battery life. After reading 100s of reviews quoting below par battery life, I did not have much expectations on the battery life.

     

    I expected around 4 hours of battery life. But, I get 2.5 hours of batter life. My usecase: I used this mainly to browse web through Chrome Browser (mostly shopping and reading news, reviews etc..)

     

    As a first thing after getting the laptop, I uninstalled all the bloatware, removed all the things from startup, disabled all the unncessary services (changed from Automatic to Manual). Mostly, the brightness is kept at 40%.

     

    I tried changing the power profile from Balanced to Power Saver, but did not help. Any help will be appreciated.

  • BeefMaster
    BeefMaster Member Posts: 1 New User

    Gonna bump this, as I'm seeing the same problems as the last poster - it's just devouring the battery if I do anything that heats up the processor at all.  Netflix isn't much of a problem, but stuff like multi-tab web browsing can start to warm it up, and gaming (not even anything too hard core, just what I'd consider fairly innocuous stuff like Fallout Shelter or Civilization V) turns the back of the tablet into a raging inferno and rips down the battery at or over 1%/minute.

     

    I've sent it in for service (it was a factory refurb model) and had both the battery and main board replaced, and they claimed that they got six hours of video streaming in their post-replacement test.  Unfortunately, I deleted the dummy user I'd created for their service team, so I can't dig in and see what exactly they were using for settings.  I've turned down the brightness from the default, and switched between the "Balanced" and "Power Saving" power plans to no avail.  Does this sound like a bum unit, or are there other things here I should be tweaking?

  • JMiddle
    JMiddle Member Posts: 3 New User
    I had to reinstall a fresh copy of windows, which I got from Microsoft website. Then I installed the drivers, and created a custom power plan. After that I get 9 hours Word editing with Microsoft office, about 4-5 hours of video playback, 6 hours of web browsing with edge, and about 3 hours of gaming. Not all on the same charge obviously. Also for some reason the battery drained even faster with wifi off so I left it on and turned airplane mode on instead.