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Laptop powers down instead of hibernating when battery charge runs out

Anonymous
2022-01-01T23:38:42+00:00

I have my laptop's "Critical battery action" set to "Hibernate" when running on the battery. The Low and Critical battery levels are default (10% and 5% respectively). The "Low battery action" is "Do nothing".

My battery was running low and I was trying to work right up until the point of hibernation. However, the computer simply shut down rather than hibernating. It was very sudden (no shut down message).

How can I ensure that the laptop hibernates instead of shutting down?

What I tried:

  • I found this SuperUser post, but I know that Hibernation is enabled as I do it manually.
  • The laptop is an HP EliteBook 840 G6 with 12GB RAM and 475GB SDD, of which 238GB is free. I suspect that this is enough disk space for hibernation.
  • The only BIOS information I could find about power management do not include the actions when Critical batter level is reached (image below)

enter image description here

  • I tried a full charge from dead to 100%, full depletion to dead, and a full charge to 100%, but the laptop still shuts down when the charge runs out instead of hibernating
  • I charged it up to 100% again and boosted the Critical battery level from 5% to 10%. The charge indicator is supposed to be properly calibrated after so many full chargings and discharges. Together with the additional 5% headroom, I expected this to leave enough margin to hibernate when the charge runs out. It did not. The laptop still shuts down instead of hibernating when the charge runs out.
  • I charged it up to 100% again and set Critical battery level to 20% to see if the additional margin allows for hibernation. Since Low battery level had to be higher than Critical, I had to set the former to 25%. The discharging battery blew past the Critical level of 20%, reaching 16% at the time of updating this bullet.

Essentially, I can manually hibernate and I can set the Critical battery action to hibernate, but the latter is simply ignored when the charge indicator reaches the Critical battery level.

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Sleep and Power on, off

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-01-04T17:08:52+00:00

    I ran out of options, so I enabled the "Power Control" checkbox in the BIOS's "Advanced" menu (as shown in my posted question). That allowed the hibernation to be performed at the Critical battery level.

    I can't mark my own reply as the answer to my own question. If someone can please mark this as the answer, it will highlight it for others who may encounter this problem. Thanks!

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-01-02T23:48:22+00:00

    Yes, but why does Windows not even initiate hibernation when the battery charge is 20%? It continued working until it reached 10%. It's not as if it tried to hibernate at 20% and failed to. It didn't even try.

    If the timestamped bullets of my earlier reports are somewhat accurate, it took 2+ hours to drop from 20% to less than 10%. I can't see how we can conclude that there was not enough time to hibernate. It's clear that no attempt was made to hibernate when it was supposed to.

    What could prevent Windows from even trying to hibernate at the Critical battery level?

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-01-02T23:18:59+00:00

    Battery usually contains of 3 or 6 elements. if one element begins to lose capacity and two others have more capacity, the voltage drop may became very quickly when the capacity of worst element is exhausted. Windows may suggest there is enough capacity still to successfully hibernate but in fact battery stops working in the middle of the process and you see Kernel-Power 41 error in journal and laptop starts boot not awaking from hibernation when it is turned on again.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-01-02T20:56:28+00:00

    Sorry but seems this is battery problem unfortunately, and you need to replace it. Or check laptop in service center.

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-01-02T00:31:54+00:00

    Hi Franky,

    My name is Igor, I have 12 Microsoft MVP awards. It's a pleasure for me to help others and I'll do all my best to help you. I'm sorry you have a problems.

    How old is your battery?

    Please check system journal (Event Viewer) for possible errors at these moments, especially Kernel-Power errors. DistributedCOM errors should be ignored.

    Or save system journal to evtx file and share it to OneDrive for analysis.

    Was laptop hibernated successfully when Critical level was set to 20%?

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