Hello! My girlfriend’s HP laptop running kubuntu 24.04 has this problem: when it’s turned off (either from the GUI or poweroff) it discharges overnight, from 100% to 0% in a few days.
I searched the web to look for fixes:
- wake on lan is disabled in the BIOS
- USB ports have no settings in the bios, but there’s nothing connected to them anyway
- the system is actually powered off, not sleeping (at least if
poweroffactually works) - everything, firmware included, is up to date
She doesn’t remember having this problem from the beginning, but cannot tell when this started occurring
Did any of you ever encounter this problem? I don’t know what else to do, and it’s quite annoying.
Thank you for your time!
does this happen if you force it to shut down by holding the power button for +10sec, or if you remove and reinsert the battery after power off?
forcing a shutdown or removing and installing the battery, will ensure that the laptop is indeed shut down and not just halting during the shutdown process.
if you still have the same issue after this test I would guess your battery is dying, but if not you know that the issue is a software and not a hardware problem…
anyway, best of luck getting it sorted
on most new laptops, you cannot remove the battery that easily, you have to disassemble the back cover ☹️
I’ll try it as soon as I can, thanks for the suggestion! I don’t think the battery is dying, because while powered on the battery life is very good
let’s hope it’s a software issue, in general it’s much cheaper to fix software than hardware 🙂
you can also try using the “sudo halt --poweroff” command.
if it ks software related. that command will force an instant shutdown ignoring all normal shutdown run levels (use with caution if you have open files that need to be saved in advance).
if that command succeeds as well after the battery test, you can be sure the problem lies within the shutdown run level scripts, which should help you narrow it down even more.
do you have any usb devices, like external hard drives, chargers or similar connected to it? a lot of the laptops allows for usb charging/supply of power even when switched off, and this could be one of the sources for the drainage.
try disconnecting all USB cables if any are connected and see if the problem disappears?
never mind, did not see the line about no connected usb cables until after posting
My wife’s HP laptop does this as well (she is running Windows). A previous laptop did this and a BIOS update fixed it. For most laptops the official response from manufacturers seems to be: eat shit.
My son’s Windows laptop did the same. Turns out there is a setting to make Windows truly shut down when selecting “shut down” from the menu, because normally it secretly sleeps or hibernates or something to have faster start-up times. There’s also the power another device via USB option that you may have to disable in BIOS / EFI settings.
There’s a feature to allow charging from USB ports while a computer is off, Lenovo calls it “Always on USB.” That feature is constantly using power even when nothing is plugged in. To test if any ports have that feature power off the computer then try plugging in a simple 5v 500ma usb device to charge. If it starts charging then it has that feature and will drain power. If no options to disable in BIOS then as far as I know stuck :(
I’ve worked on a couple recent gen refurb laptops (dell and lenovo) with that feature but lacking any disable option in BIOS. I’ve tried to get into the habit of plugging in whenever not being used but still end up with things empty more often than I like. Very frustrating and I think only hope is future bios update to give that option.
Some level of self-discharge happens over time with even a disconnected battery, but that does seem greater than expected. I’d suspect hardware issues, to be honest. Batteries are fickle little creatures that deteriorate over time no matter what you do. Maybe it’s misreporting the amount of charge left to the OS.
