Disabling Connected Standby

As you know a few days ago I purchased a Notion Ink Cain, a Windows 8.1 tablet-slash-laptop. This is my first Windows tablet so while it doubles as both, I have slightly different expectations and use cases from this.

One of these is the battery life. Whereas I always hibernate my regular laptop, the Cain is just put to sleep once I am done with it. I put it to sleep either via the Power button or the device goes to sleep on its own. This is fine but for two problems – (1) since the device is only sleeping and I usually dock it into the keyboard and use the flap as the cover, any key presses when the device is asleep results in it waking up and thus some battery draining; (2) since the Cain supports Connected Standby (nowadays called InstantGo) the device does not really sleep in the way we usually expect Windows devices to sleep, the sleep here is more like a “light sleep” wherein the device is kind of awake and able to let some background stuff like email and other programs run and do their bit.

I work around the first issue either by rotating the Cain and then docking it, such that the keyboard is behind the device and so keypresses don’t get registered (the Cain requires the docking to be correct for the keyboard to be recognize). I also put the Cain in a pouch without the keyboard. It’s not very elegant but that’s what I was doing until today.

The second was an irritating issue. When I first read about Connected Standby I was very impressed with it. It’s not supposed to drain much battery. The requirement is that when on Connected Standby the device will lose less than 5% of its power over a 16 hour idle period, but that didn’t seem to be the case for me (try a powercfg /sleepstudy to get some results) and I wasn’t happy with the battery drain. Maybe it’s because I had set apps such as email to update in real time and so the device was regularly waking up to check email, I found that it barely lasted 2-3 days even when fully idle. That’s not great, and even putting it in airplane mode only made it slightly better.

To work around this I decided to start hibernating the device. I enabled the hibernation option in the Power menu and also created a shortcut to hibernate in the start menu. But these are manual approaches didn’t seem “neat”. I wanted something where the Cain would automatically hibernate after a period of inactivity. I remembered back in Windows 7 (and even on my Windows 8 laptops) there are options under the Power menu in Control Panel to make the laptop sleep after a certain period and then hibernate. On the Cain though, this option was missing and I wasn’t sure why. I had a suspicion it must be because the Cain uses Connected Standby and so perhaps disabling it will reveal these options. I Google’d a bit to see if there’s a way to disable Connect Standby. Surprisingly I couldn’t find anything until finally some forum post mentioned another forum post that gave a registry key setting which disables Connected Standby. Applied that to the Cain and now I have the option to hibernate after a certain period. Yaay!