Laptop sometimes shuts down when out of power causing me to lose my unsaved files

Question

Why does it do this? Most of the time my laptop just goes to sleep when it gets to 0% power. But sometimes it completely shuts down and I lose my unsaved files.

Is this a problem with my laptop? The battery runs out fast, so I'm not sure if it's related to that.

Answer 1

What's happening is probably either your computer going into sleep mode (rather than hibernation) and then running out of power, which causes things that are just in the working memory and not saved to disk to be lost, or else it's running out of power before it's managed to go into hibernation.

In either case you, go into the "power options" (you can just type that into the start menu) and edit the plan settings for the current plan you're using. Go to "Change advanced power settings" and find the "Battery" settings group. Change the "Critical battery level" and "Low battery level" to a higher value (I believe they default to 5 % and 10 %, try 10 % and 15 % respectively). Then make sure the "Critical battery action" is set to "hibernation". That should help with the problem.

Answer 2

Understanding our battery

In summary: the gauges of the laptop power settings with the actual condition of your battery do not allow always to the the system to properly shut down.

• What is happening?
  The system has not enough time to properly shut down all the services, save the files and dump the memory before the power level is too low.
  Alternatively, if the system is set to go in sleep mode and not in hibernation, the battery discharges without that the systems wakes up and dump itself in hibernation.
• What's the cause?
  The battery discharge rate is not linear and constant in time, and it is not exactly the same for each cycle; it depends from the energy requests, the age of the battery, the external temperature, and the characteristics of the specific battery. If the battery is old, damaged, or used in challenging external condition it can abruptly be discharged. (See the further reading below).

• Why only sometimes and not always?
  In a working laptop, the discharge depends from the requests. The requests of the system/programs in that critical moment can be so different to allow to the system sometimes to save all and sometimes not. Even the quantity of energy communicated by the battery can be different from the real one and the system can take time that it really doesn't have.

• What else can it be?
  It can be the CPU/GPU temperature protection, if the temperature grows too much. There can be a spike of requests when the computer want to hibernate that increases the CPU temperature, the accesses to the disk. It can be a contributory cause for the abrupt discharge too, many requests more energy used, all at once.

How to patch this situation?

If the problem is that the hardware and software data are not matching, you should try to fix for first the hardware side. If it is not needed or possible, you can try to change in the software the data interpretation (patching the lecture of the discharge level in your system). In this optic you can even set different levels after which the system starts his hibernation:

• You can recalibrate the battery gauge ^[4b], there are different methods and tools, search for one suitable for your laptop. Many vendors provide tools and procedure, e.g. for HP.^[4HP]

• You can change your settings, creating a power plan specific for the condition of your battery ^[4]; giving a look below to the Further readings section, you can have hints about how much you should to increase the minimum level, of you can proceed with trials and errors:

  Control Panel - Power Options - Power Plans - Change plan Settings -
  check the Advanced Settings for drain and usage settings ^[4c]

  Give it a look to the other answers ^[3],[3b] too.

• Buy a new battery: sadly for an hardware irreparable failure, or simply age, you will be forced to.

Further readings

Simply speaking the battery is like a bottle of water, how fast it will be empty depends on its capacity, on how much water you take per minute, on the quantity of water the bottle leaks even without requests. In this analogy you can see how the water exit more faster from the bottle when it is almost empty then when it is almost full.

• The discharge of a battery depends on many factors and differs from type to type, but, for what it is important here, presents a behaviour similar to the one of the picture below; note that when it starts to fall it falls fast:

  
  _{Image from a blog ^[6]. In red the line below the one the battery can say (the system can assume) that it is fully discharged (and stops to work). The age, or the defects, can deviate the behaviour of the battery from the expected one; in particular it can be more abrupt the sliding on the right part of the graph.}

  The voltage of the battery is related with the residual capacity and it is communicated to (read by) the system.
  
  _{Image for another battery that shows the correlation between the Capacity on the horizontal*axis, and the voltage on the vertical one. Different colours for different temperatures. Note that I didn't expect that Windows or the battery are taking in account the different curve function of the temperature. So I expect that will work on a single curve, an average one, (so a not completely right one).}

  Now if this is not accurate or if the systems for spikes in the requests needs more energy, it will not be able to properly shut down.

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At the end of all this reading take a moment to smile on your problem because the most simple answers were:

1. "It is shutting down because it isn't plugged in" Ramhound ^[1]
2. "You lost the files because you didn't save them regularly" Hastur and J. de La Palice^[2]

Answer 3

You should not be letting your battery get to 0% - at minimum it's killing whatever battery life you have left.

It sounds to me that your battery is well past its use-by date, and may simply not have enough juice left in it to reliably shut down the system when it runs out of power. If it can't finish suspending then of course it's going to power off suddenly (without completing a normal shut down) and you will likely lose unsaved work.

Answer 4

It is impossible for the laptop to "go to sleep" when it has run out of power. Sleep requires power; just less than non-sleep.

The system could hibernate when power gets low, but if your battery is draining really quickly, it's probably deemed that not to be safe.

Most likely the PSU has simply cut out without any meaningful warning to the operating system.

Get a new battery, or leave your laptop plugged in instead of letting it get to 0% all the time.

Answer 5

@davidgo is spot on that it's probably a broken or old battery. You can check this with an app such as BatteryCare or BatteryInfoView. It will let you know its age, wear, number of cycles, and its designed max capacity vs its current max capacity. You can use that to decide if replacing the battery might be the solution.

Answer 6

My anecdote/answer:

My brother had a laptop which was well over 8 years old with the original battery.

This laptop would charge up to 100% and if you unplug it then you had about 3 minutes to plug it back in.

As you can imagine the battery percentage probably dropped in chunks of at least 20%

If his power settings were set up to do something at 5/10/15% then you can bet these settings were never triggered since the laptop would go from 20% down to 0% in an instant and die without properly shutting down.

Answer 7

Like others said you might have a old battery. But it might also just be a wrong setting. You should be able to set at which battery level your systems shuts down/hibernates. On windows, the level when the pc hibernates is 5%, so if you use windows and your battery goes to 0%, the setting was changed!

If you use Windows, it is in the control panel > Power Options > Change Plan Settings > Change Advanced Power Settings. The default "critical battery level" is 5%. If your battery is weak, increase it to 10% or even more to allow the pc to hibernate.

This obviously won't fix a broken battery, but if your battery still has enough power to allow your pc to safely hibernate, it might be enough for you!

Answer 8

Another potential issue is disk caching. Hard drives and operating systems use volatile caches. If the computer shuts down too quickly, even deliberately, and the caches are not committed, you will lose data.

Try disabling "Disk Write Caching" on your disk. Device Manager -> Disk Drives -> (Select your HDD/SSD) -> Policies -> Untick "Enable write caching on the device".

Answer 9

Have you been able to observe your computer as it ran out of power without hibernating? You don't give any information about your environment, but going into hibernation often requires some cooperation from active programs. A program that doesn't respond properly can prevent hibernation. Usually the OS might pop up a message telling you this happened, but you won't know if you're not there to see it before the system goes dark...

Answer 10

The simple answer, probably a duplicate of other answers: Older batteries discharge faster when they are almost empty. When the battery is low enough that the PC needs to sleep, it is also ready to shutdown, so it just does that instead.

Replace the battery, the problem is just going to get worse.

Answer 11

Laptops doesn't go shutdown when battery level is below 5%.when if reaches its lowest point it goes to sleep mode to protect your data. Mean while in sleep mode it consumes some energy. If it is beyond the extreme level, it does shutdown and you may loose your unsaved data. There are multiple ways to recover your unsaved data depends on type of applications.