Fix: HP Stream 7 Battery Drain while Standby

The HP Stream 7 has a terrible battery life. Reports on forums indicate that it is due to the connected standby mode in Windows 8.1 and also the Intel SST Audio driver. The combination of these two factors means that approximately 2-3% of battery is drained per hour as your tablet is not able to fully sleep. Typically, my tablet wakes up flat in a couple of days. That sucks.

The simple workaround is to lower the tablets volume to “0” with the volume rocker before putting your tablet to sleep and also switching Wi-Fi to off. This will improve the standby battery life from hours to days. However, this is a tedious process.

A forumer on Windows Central had created a couple of Task Scheduler scripts to automate this process. It works very well on my HP Stream 7.

Markjjordan has created a couple of PowerShell scripts that will automate the toggling of WiFi and volume when the tablet goes to sleep mode. Whenever the device goes into connected standby, either by pressing the power button or via timeout, the Wi-Fi will automatically get disabled and the volume set to mute. Conversely, when the unit comes out of connected standby mode, the Wi-Fi will automatically get enabled and the volume unmuted.

Following is a link to the ConnectedStandbyAutomation.zip that contains the PowerShell scripts, as well as the exports of his 2 task scheduler definitions. Just unzip the contents of the zip file to a folder, and import the task scheduler definitions to Task Scheduler. You would need to edit the folder location of the two tasks under properties. The default location is C:Program FilesConnectedStandbyAutomation. Also, you might need to check if your powershell has the right permissions to run. Run powershell.exe from a Command Prompt as adminstrator (type cmd in Windows search, right click the icon and select run as administrator). Then type: “Powershell.exe -noninteractive -noprofile -command “& { & ‘c:FolderLocationConnectedStandbyAutomationConnectedStandby_DisableWifiAndEnableMute.ps1’ }”

There’s likely to an error message so skip to next step. Run powershell.exe from a Command Prompt as administrator. Enter the following command: Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted.

This will allow the tablet / powershell to Load all configuration files and run all scripts. The default policy

On Windows 8.1, start Task Scheduler by navigating to the start screen and typing schedule: the option Schedule Tasks should appear. I

Want to know more on the HP Stream 7 – Check out my review of this 7″ mini Windows tablet here.