Constant High Battery Use On Laptop (50W)
I noticed this a few days ago: while this laptop is unplugged, its power drain rate is around 50 W, typically 45-55. That's while doing nothing special, eg. idling with a terminal window and a Files window, Steam not running, browser not running. Power Saver mode is on. Bluetooth is disabled. Even with wi-fi disabled. No particularly weird software knowingly installed. Tried cranking screen brightness to minimum. I noticed also that two recent Steam games, Helldivers 2 and Windrose, also became unplayable around a week ago, while old TF2 still runs fine. (That's while plugged in.) So the laptop burns through its battery in an hour instead of 2-3.
Hardware: Thunderobot Radiant 16 i9 5070Ti 2.5K 300Hz Gaming Laptop, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, Core i9-13900HX, purchased in December 2025.
Things I've tried include:
-Resetting repeatedly
-Installing an earlier kernel version, downgrading from "6.17.0-23-generic" to "6.8.0-111-generic"; making sure that version is actually running via "uname -r"
-Booting to Windows 11. Power drain is also noticeably high, about .75% of a supposed 54 Wh battery per minute; shared problem?
-Trying to disable the GPU
-Checking the BIOS options; nothing relevant seen
-Switching desktop mode to "Zorin OS on Xorg"
-Uninstalling Notepad++
-Forcing audio codec power saving with commands: "echo "options snd_hda_intel power_save=1 power_save_controller=Y" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/audio-power.conf
sudo update-initramfs -u"
-Killing audio service with "systemctl --user stop pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber"
-Recalling that I had a local LLM running at one point, and calling "sudo systemctl disable ollama" and "sudo systemctl stop ollama" so that it should be down
-Checking "sudo powertop". According to this, I have a very high rate of "wakeups per second", varying from about 4000-3000. Tried changing the "Tunables" tab to toggle everything "Bad" to "Good", which I would love to do with some things in real life.
Powertop's Device Stats tab shows 100% usage at all times for whatever this large set of "PCI Device" entries is. Some of it seems to be related to my network card. I tried the command "sudo modprobe -r rtw89_8852be" to try disabling the wireless adapter; no effect other than being sent offline.
So my theory at the moment is, "Something about the network system or some other firmware got an update around April/May 2026 that utterly ruins its efficiency, and probably applies on Windows as well". Is that what's going on, and is there any way to roll back? The next thing i plan to try is a reinstallation of Zorin OS, but if it's really some unrelated subsystem even that probably won't work.
Any ideas? I want my battery life back, and if this is somehow related to the gaming problem that would be nice to know, too. I have a CS degree but little Linux experience.
