XPS 10 battery usage when sleeping

You say you turn off the screen, but do you put the laptop into sleep or hibernate mode? This is necessary to reduce battery drain. For more than a few hours, use hibernate instead of sleep, as this uses very little power.

The tablet is set to go to sleep automatically after 4 minutes while on battery, and 10 minutes plugged in.  In all scenarios, pushing the power button is set to initate sleep mode as well.  I have also gone to the power charm and chosen sleep and had the same results.

I have not seen a hibernate option on Windows RT on the XPS 10, or I certainly might have used it.  I would expect a sleeping tablet to be unlikely to get hot to the touch, or run the battery down so quickly.

As an aside, even while sleeping, the tablet connects to WiFi (not sure if this is by design).  I can start the tethering app on my android phone, and it notifies me when a guest has connected.  Not too long after I start the app, I get a notification that my tablet has connected, despite having been put to sleep.

Additionally, I have noticed that 10% of the time, I will open the tablet and the screen is reporting that I have entered an invalid picture password, despite it having been closed all day and unused.

I have experienced the exact same problem, is there a solution?

I have not yet found a solution, and haven't had time to call support on it yet.

However, I have further diagnosed the issue.  When this issue happens, I used to open the tablet immediately, and couldn't verify it, but now I have double checked, and the screen is on inside the tablet.  I have set the tablet down on the desk, and observed the screen stay on for 10+ minutes, despite having a much shorter sleep interval.  I initially noticed this when It happened and it was dark in the room.

It does not do this if it is not docked in the keyboard, or if I have the tablet docked, but the screen is not closed.

It smells very much like a sleep/hibernate/whatever windows 8 uses issue, combined with the keyboard.

Hopefully I'll have a chance to spend the time on the phone soon to talk to support.  If I get a solution, I'll report back in this thread.

I just found this thread and wanted to mention that I am having the same battery drain issue with the keyboard with my XPS 10.  I leave the lid shut and it continues to drain the battery on the tablet even though it is set to sleep on closing the lid or pressing the power button.   I don't have anything new to offer here other than what is already being discussed.  It is certainly not an acceptable behavior for a product designed to be very power efficient.  

I have already had my XPS 10 replaced with a new one for sleep related problems and a cracked hinge on my keyboard.  I had hoped I had a faulty unit, but it appears this new unit is still not behaving properly w.r.t. to sleep power consumption.  I too have noticed occasionally that the screen is on when it is docked and the lid is shut, but am still trying to determine if it is user error or if it in fact turns on without any user intervention.

I will be bringing it to work to more closely observe the behavior over the day to see if there is a pattern.

I just found this post.  I wanted to add that I, too am having the same issue.  Battery draining when just stilling docked and closed.

I ran "powercfg /batteryreport" from an Admin command prompt.  This generates a battery history.  It show that there were 2 very steep drops in power (during a 14 hour period where I didn't use it, other than to check on power level).  I then opened the Even Viewer to see what might have occurred at those 2 times to cause the drain.  Sure enough, it shows a kernel-power event at both times.  Here is the description:

"The system is exiting connected standby.  Reason: User input."

When looking through the log, I notice that a normal series of events would be that it exits connected standby when I press the power button (turn it on), and then enters connected standby shortly after when I press the power button (turn it off).  However, in both of the cases where the battery drain occurred, there is no event showing it entering connected standby again.

So, it would appear, as others have said, that our machines are waking up (exiting standby) and staying in that state and never going back to sleep (entering standby).  There is some bug causing this to happen, and I think it is unacceptable.  It only seems to happen when docked and closed.  So, I have to either keep the system undocked, or shut down completely.  Neither of those are good solutions.

I'm still trying to track down the exact sequence of events that cause this issue.  Has anyone else managed to nail down exactly what causes it?

I have two XPS 10s that do the same thing. I found something interesting when I plugged the XPS into a projector. I had a wireless keyboard and mouse to use and decided to close the lid on the XPS. When I did this I could see on the projected image what looked like screen presses on the desktop. It seemed the keyboard was actually reacting with the touch screen while closed. This would probably be enough for the tablet to think its being woken up. If this happens when the lid is down it would keep the machine active. Pretty dire design defect I would say and really disappointing. Only solution would be to set the XPS to shut down when screen is closed but this defeats the always on Windows RT methodology

Did some testing and it appears to be the touchpad that is activating the screen (or the other way around). If I disable the touchpad using the Dell app then the tablet appears to sleep (screen does not turn on) when the lid is closed. If this is indeed the issue it should be easy to fix this - just disable the touchpad when the lid is closed.

It's possible that one or more of the key caps is close to or touching the touchpad when the lid is closed. I know of at least one laptop (M1530) where the keyboard can be not flat because of wires inside that are not in the correct position and force the keyboard upwards. The keyboard can be flattened by re-dressing the wires.

I will look into disabling the touchpad on mine, and see if it resolves the issue.  It would be helpful information to have when I get time to call into support and deal with it.

Turning the touchpad off helps, but doesn't totally solve the problem for me.  The screen still gets turned on when I'm moving it around, but it does seem to happen less often.  It would be nice to be able to carry it around and not have to totally turn the system off.

I'm having a problem where when I hit the power button to put my XPS 10 to sleep (while sitting, open, connected to the dock) it will turn the screen back in anywhere from 10-30 seconds.  Even more interesting, the lock screen will slide up every once in a while like someone swiped the screen.

Using the Dell Dock settings to turn off the Touchpad doesn't SEEM to have much of an affect on it, and if I disconnect the dock, it doesn't behave this way and stays asleep.  So I'm pretty sure its something in the dock.

So I went into Device Manager and Disabled the Synaptics HID Device, and to my surprise the touchpad still worked.  So then I tried disabling the "USB Input Device" and the touchpad stopped working.  After disabling that, my XPS 10 will no longer wake up from sleep unless I hit the power button or keyboard.  Therefore, its definitely the touchpad/mouse driver that is causing it to wakeup.

The other thing I have noticed is although the screen will typically shut off while closed, the XPS 10 does not always "sleep".  I can tell this because I'll open the lid and be looking at the start menu.  I have it configured to only ask for a password if sleeping for more than 10 minutes and when it does sleep, I get the lock screen and have to swipe up to clear it.

Since its a touch screen, I might leave the USB input Device Disabled for a couple days and see if it affects this behavior and battery drain.

I have extact same problem, hope dell sees this and fixes it...

I confirmed over the weekend that I had no false wakeups with Dock attached after I disabled the "USB Input Device" in device manager. However, that particular device has the option to "Allow the device to wake the computer" greyed out.  I would love to have an option of "Allow only the power button to bring computer out of sleep" somewhere.