Excessive battery drain NoHwDrips.DF and NoHwDrips.USB3-HC1

In a different post I complained about Modern Standby. I largely fixed its issues by disabling network activity during standby on battery and AC, disabling windows indexer, defender and a bunch of other MS BS.
However, I still find that there is occassionally excessive battery drain during sleep. E.g. 6% for 22 mins of sleep, which is too much even if the laptop was being used.
According to the sleep study, the culprits are always NoHwDrips.DF and NoHwDrips.USB3-HC1, an example below



The OS is running Windows 11 with all latest updates, drivers and firmware incl the updates Lenovo System 3.12.0.56 and Lenovo System 2.0.0.10. The CPU is Ryzen 7 5800H.

What could these stand for?

If you do a web search on NoHwDrips you will see this is normal for modern sleep and just another thing that is wrong with it. The only thing anyone has been able to suggest in forums across the web is to use hibernate or turn the system off rather than using modern sleep.
In power options, check your advanced power setting for USB to make sure selective suspend is enabled.

You have a battery drain problem because your computer is not sleeping, it is on & idle.
- S0 Modern standby is a glorified idle condition.
- S0 is not S3 Sleep.

If you do not want to waste your battery power then use hibernate when you would have used S3 Sleep on a non-S0 computer.

Denis

Is it really normal though? My understanding of these NoHwDrips battery drain issues is that it is due to a problem in a driver or firmware. What could NoHwDrips.DF stand for?

wrgwh said:

6% for 22 mins

Click to expand...

Actually, I had not considered the "6%" in your post carefully. Sorry. Yes, that is high.

What state is your battery in? How much does it drop if you use the computer for 22 mins?
- Light-use, such as reading a pdf and waving the mouse about a bit when necessary to keep the screen on.

Denis

Try3 said:

Actually, I had not considered the "6%" in your post carefully. Sorry. Yes, that is high.

What state is your battery in? How much does it drop if you use the computer for 22 mins?
- Light-use, such as reading a pdf and waving the mouse about a bit when necessary to keep the screen on.

Denis

Click to expand...

Hi, the laptop is brand new and the battery life is over 98%. I can't put my finger on what is causing NoHwDrips.DF and NoHwDrips.USB3-HC1 battery drain as it doesn't always happen. But even when they don't light up in the sleepstudy, I get 1.5-2% battery drain per hour of sleep. This awful even for my 12 year-old Sandy Bridge laptop. Modern Standby S0 is the worst thing to have happened to Windows - all headaches with zero benefit.

I was interested in the battery usage during light use for 22 minutes as a comparison with the S0 battery drain of 6%.
I've never investigated those NoHwDrips parameters so I have no idea if you are going to get anywhere with them.

Please remember that S0 computers do not Sleep in the sense that the term is normally used [i.e. S3 Sleep]. S0 is a glorified idle condition. Its design priority is speed of resumption of normal usage.

Personally, I think S0 is at least a decade too early.
- When idle computer hardware can use as little power as idle smartphone hardware does then we might see some benefit in S0 because it will mean we can leave our computers on until next Tuesday week.
- Until then it is, as you say, all pain & no gain.

I imagine the computer with the SandyBridge CPU is another one, not the S0 one we're discussing.

My S0 computer is not one of those that allowed S0 to be disabled & S3 enabled. I can't make out from your other thread whether or not you tried that tutorial.
- Clearly it didn't work for you if you did try it.
- My attempt resulted in S0 being disabled but S3 not being enabled so I was no better off at all. And my network adapter wouldn't connect.

So I've just accepted that I have to use Hibernate on my [single] S0 computer when I would use S3 Sleep on my good computers.
I've also adapted to S0 by stopping it kicking in at all. It kicks in when the display goes off [as set in Power options] so I have set my display to stay on the whole time.
I've also set a blank screensaver to kick in at 2 mins. [Screensavers do not initiate S0, only display turning off does that]
So, when I'm on battery, I use the computer with only short interruptions or I hibernate the computer.
I'd still prefer having S3 Sleep.


All the best,
Denis

Try3 said:

My S0 computer is not one of those that allowed S0 to be disabled & S3 enabled.
- My attempt resulted in S0 being disabled but S3 not being enabled so I was no better off at all. And my network adapter wouldn't connect.

Click to expand...

I've just retried disabling S0 again this afternoon.
So now I have neither S0 Modern standby [aka S0 Low power idle] nor S3 Sleep.
When my WiFi adapter played up afterwards, I disabled it then re-enabled it and it has been well behaved ever since.
I've been restarting and I've been shutting down then starting again and the WiFi keeps working correctly.
Task scheduler will not wake the computer from hibernation even though all the appropriate settings have been made. Task scheduler didn't run during S0 anyway so I haven't lost anything.
I think I'll leave S0 disabled.

Thought you might be interested,
All the best,
Denis

OK, so after turning off USB charging during sleep and "Flip lid to boot", the results are:

• the laptop is finally sleeping with the lid open
• NoHwDrips.USB3-HC1 is silent during sleep
• low power state time for hardware is finally not 0% but above 95% during sleep
• after keeping the Nvidia gpu disabled for 1-2weeks and updating the AMD iGPU's drivers, the Nvidia is not drawing power during sleep

I have made my peace that a 1% battery drain per hour is quite good for Modern Standby, so I will now resort to hibernation after 20-30mins.

However, NoHwDrips.DF is still problematic by being active 24% of the time during sleep:

what could it stand for and how can I troubleshoot it?

Sorry to keep harping on but S0 Modern standby is not sleep. It is an idle condition.

I cannot help with your NoHwDrips investigation.
- If I am not actively using my S0 computer, I hibernate it.

All the best,
Denis

Hello All,

On My Computer No 1, I had a perfect working Modern Standby that consumed 270 mW/h.
After some initial problems, it was perfect for one year until Win 10 2004 came along.
After that it consumes 400 to 500 mW/h because the WWan LTE modem cannot be put to sleep anymore.
I sort of calculated that the sweet spot to let it switch from S0 to hibernate was 65 minutes because of the energy it took to come out of hibernation.
I don't care so much about the power consumed but I don't like the 6649595 KB Hiberfil.sys being written each time,
Needless to say things didn't change when Win 11 came up.
We lost the choice between Connected and Non Connected Standby.
I like choice but it seems they don't see it like I do.

Ciao, Han

And I forgot my question.

Does it rewrite every bit in the hiberfile each time or does it something more wear economic?

Ciao again, Han

han jansen said:

We lost the choice between Connected and Non Connected Standby

Click to expand...

Brink thinks that the choice exists.
Enable or Disable Modern Standby Network Connectivity - ElevenForumTutorials

All the best,
Denis

Hi Denis,
After once again trying the things in the tutorial I once again come to the conclusion that this worked before but not anymore.
At least not on my system.
See this is returned from powercfg /A.

PS C:\Users\pizza> powercfg A
The following sleep states are available on this system:
Standby (S0 Low Power Idle) Network Connected
Hibernate
Before it read Network Connected and Network Disconnected.

So I was inclined to think that it was MS Windows homing in on a true Connected only Standby.
All this affects the software device Intel(R) XMM7360-P WWAN from the Fibocom L850-GL LTE card.
This might also be a driver problem but I never got i to work, no matter what driver I give it.
Even the ones from Win 10 1909 don't resolved this.

This device will not sleep, SW 0% HW -

The only way to shut it up is to disable in Device Manager and the keep it from coming back wit a Group Policy.

So to follow the Brink format, "That's it".

What do you think?

Ciao, Han

​

​

Han, if you set "disable" on BOTH battery and AC, Powercfg will show Network disconnected. Any other combination will result in Network Connected. (I should note that I tested this on a Win 10 system but expect that it would be same on 11)

Hello dlross,

You are right.
But this does change nothing for my Lenovo X1 Yoga 3gens behaviour.
The settings don't work.
They are either fake and not in use anymore, we saw that before, or I have a driver problem.
Would like to hear from someone that uses the Fibocom L850-GL card on a Win 11 system that shows SW and HW drips at 99% or so.

Thank you for keeping me honest though.

Ciao, Han

Hi Han,
As a confirmation of your last point I ran a test of the settings on my Surface Pro 7 (again this is Win 10 but probably won't make a difference). As far as I can test you're correct, the setting does not seem able to shut down network connectivity. Probably not your card or driver at fault I'd guess. I've pretty much decided to go with hibernate in spite of hiberfil disk use.

han jansen said:

Before it read Network Connected and Network Disconnected.

Click to expand...

Han,

I'm sorry but it did not. It said one or the other but not both. It has never said both.

I can only test on a Windows 10 computer because my Windows 11 test computer is an S3 Sleep computer not an S0 Modern standby computer.
But I've taken part in many S0 discussions in ElevenForum and I haven't seen anybody else mention any difficulty in switching between connected & disconnected standby.
Or are we talking at cross-purposes, perhaps?
I was only referring to switching between connected & disconnected standby not to enabling/disabling S0 itself, which not all computers can do. Mine can't; I can disable S0 but I cannot enable S3 Sleep.

I suggest that you post in Brink's tutorial itself if you really cannot switch between connected & disconnected standby.

All the best,
Denis

Hello Denis

I should have said or.
But when I entered this thread and did a powercfg /A it returned
The following sleep states are available on this system:
Standby (S0 Low Power Idle) Network Connected
And because I haven't looked at the subject for quite some time, the word "available" set me on the wrong foot.
And Windows is not helping here, look at this sentence.
Fast Startup
This action is "disabled" in the current system policy.
So I figured Network Disconnected was a thing of the past.
After following the tutorial again, I was able to switch between the two states but it changed nothing in the pc's behaviour.
Just by looking at my screenshots you see the problem.
Standby power conso is not outrages but was 300 or less mW/h before when all was well.
You can see that there no time spent in the Lowest Power State and I think it is a driver problem now that was not there 'till Win 10 2004 came around.
All this is not a problem and my machine is even capable of S3 Sleep when I tell it to in UEFI.
Would just be nice that, with all the calling home from Microsoft and Lenovo, a solution came up.
Just to prove that they haven't given up on a three year old machine.

Ciao, Han

Oh and Denis,

what could be these cross-purposes?

Ciao, Han