Windows 8.1 update battery life

jescott418
jescott418 Member Posts: 38 Troubleshooter

Have a V5-122P and notice after doing the 8.1 update that battery life has been reduced. I read a couple places where AMD worked with Windows 8 team on imporving AMD's APU chips performance and I can attest that I do believe the performance is a bit better. But I guess the downside is worse battery life? Wonder if anyone else has noticed this on a AMD chip PC? Otherwise was glad to see Acer post new 8.1 drivers which I updated. 

Answers

  • ThomACE
    ThomACE Member Posts: 12 New User

    I also have a reduced batterylife for my new Acer Aspire v7 (i7-4500, GT750,..).
    Before the update I could get almost 5hours of batterylife (which is awesome). Since the update I can only get 2hours max...

    I already updated every driver I could find and it gave me half an hour extra. So now I'm at 50% of my batterylife before the update to Windows 8.1...

    Please Acer, do something about this.

  • jozefrockz
    jozefrockz Member Posts: 20 New User

    even if its in Power Saving mode still the battery is merely 2 hours??? Mine updated to Windows 8.1 Pro and I get 6 hours battery life on power saving and 5 hours on Balanced mode.

     

    Btw, we dont have the same hardware but still its an acer ultrathin notebook...

     

    anyway, i hope acer can release a BIOS update for power saving and might be Microsoft should also release an update for laptop owners running Windows 8.1 just like Mavericks where battery life is very awesome even my MBP Late 2012 is getting more batt life than my new acer lappy.

  • ThomACE
    ThomACE Member Posts: 12 New User

    Thanks for the reply.

    After updating everything I could update, I get 3hours of 'normal usage' on Power Saving Mode. 

    It's a little better than just after the update to 8.1 but still not the 5hours from before.

    I really don't have a clue to what I should do next..

    (I have a touchscreen and a 1920-1080p screen so it probably uses a little more energy than your laptop? Still doesn't change the fact that Windows 8.1 cut my battery life in half!)

  • jozefrockz
    jozefrockz Member Posts: 20 New User

    Maybe you can also lower down the power being used by the display it should be on the Power options on the Intel HD Graphics software, set to Maximum battery life when using Battery mode.

     

    Mine is a TravelMate X series, running i5-3337U, I suppose your hardware should be more capable of having more battery since its using a Haswell proc which improves battery life according to docus.

     

     

  • leonbakhan
    leonbakhan Member Posts: 1 New User

    Although I do not have an acer notebook, The same problem occured when I upgraded my hp Sleekbook 4 from win 8 to windows 8.1

    With win 8 the battery life of the sleekbook was about 7 hours but after the upgrade the battery life came down to about 3 hours., evern with the power saving options.

    My hp Envy  sleekbook 4 runs core i5 processor. I had to revert back to windows 8 and the battery life is back to what it was previously. I have tried all the things written in all the forums that I could find on googling, but to no remedy.

    The only thing that has corrected the battery issue  was to revert back to windows 8. Microsoft has no answer to it, except unofficialy saying that to keep the bluetoth on with discovery off. Even that did not solve the issue.

  • ThomACE
    ThomACE Member Posts: 12 New User

    Do you miss the new features you had in windows 8.1? Because the possibility to choose te size of different windows is an awesome feature. Also the startbutton (after right-clicking it) is very handy..

    I hope ACER or Microsoft will come up with a solution for this problem. It's a minority of users whom experience battery-life reduction but it's still quite a large group..

    Somethimes I hope an ACER Technician reads these messages and comes up with a solution but that's just wishful thinking..

This discussion has been closed.