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I’m having an issue with my laptop battery draining too quickly.

I tried optimizing power consumption by installing auto-cpufreq using the --install command as per a guide I found.

However, I haven’t noticed any difference in battery life—it still drains just as fast, even when I’m just coding in an IDE or browsing in Firefox.

First of all, I also tried tlp, but it doesn't help either.

  • Could the issue be with the battery itself (e.g., wear and tear)? How can I check
  • What other power optimization methods can I
  • Could Firefox or my IDE (e.g., VS Code) be causing the rapid drain? How can I check this?
  • Are there any alternatives to auto-cpufreq that might help?

My Setup:

OS: - Debian GNU/Linux 12 bookworm (x86-64)

Inteface: - Cinnamon Version 5.6.8

Processor: - 11th Gen Intel© Core™ i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz × 4

I bought my laptop 2 years ago.

Results of command: upower -i $(upower -e | grep BAT) | grep -E 'energy-full|capacity'

    energy-full:         28.8827 Wh
    energy-full-design:  37.037 Wh
    capacity:            77.9834%
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    Please edit the question and include your machine hardware. The graphics card and whether it is onboard or discrete is especially relevant. We also need to know how old the battery/machine is, if this is a new problem and it used to be better etc. Commented Mar 9, 2025 at 15:10
  • Can you run upower -i $(upower -e | grep BAT) to check the battery status and the information that @terdon meant, like the model and age of the device/battery and post that? Commented Mar 9, 2025 at 15:37
  • @AslanPAPA You find a Solution? Commented Mar 12, 2025 at 13:04
  • @ReflectYourCharacter Not yet! Commented Mar 13, 2025 at 7:25

1 Answer 1

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My answer now only refers to checking the condition of the battery.

According to the internet, your CPU is from 2020.

If the battery is heavily worn, no software solution will help!

You can check the battery condition with this:

All values from BAT:

upower -i $(upower -e | grep BAT)

Other values for BAT, without commas and percentage values:

cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/uevent

The 3 most important values for the condition (My grep can be optimized :) ):

upower -i $(upower -e | grep BAT) | grep -E 'energy-full|capacity'

The three values indicate the current condition and remaining capacity of the battery:

energy-full shows the amount of energy the battery can currently store, energy-full-design indicates the original maximum amount of energy the battery could store, and capacity shows the percentage of remaining capacity compared to the original value.

There are other packages that can be installed, if not already present, to check the battery condition.

Edit:

37.037 Wh is actually of normal size, but you can see that only 3/4 of the original capacity is available.

77% should still be reasonably functional.

I’ll assume now that it’s the battery and not resource-hungry programs causing the issue.

We work a lot with new, B-grade, and C-grade laptops.

For new products, we always get only a 6-month warranty on the batteries, as they usually experience the most wear first.

For used B-grade and C-grade products, with 2 identical devices with the exact same setup, for example:

One has a capacity at 50%, another at 80%, and the one with 80% discharges much faster than the one with 50%.

This means we now have a small report on the three values with upower, but still, the battery behaves differently than it should.

That is always the problem with used batteries.

Check the usage of the programs with these commands:

    1. Shell powertop:

sudo /sbin/powertop

    1. FireFox(in the address bar):

about:performance

    1. Visual Studio Code(Shell), I'm not sure anymore about that, i think it was:

code --status

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  • I have this, its so bad i guasse? energy-full: 28.8827 Wh energy-full-design: 37.037 Wh capacity: 77.9834% Commented Mar 9, 2025 at 18:14

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