Methods of reducing power consumption in a computing device are described in which file sharing applications which are running in the background are offloaded onto a lower power subsystem and the rest of the computing device can be put into a low power state. The lower power subsystem runs application stubs which autonomously execute a subset of the operations performed by a file sharing application which was previously running on the computing device. Before the rest of the computing device goes into the low power state, application state information is passed to the lower power subsystem for use by the application stubs. In an example, the application stub may continue to download files whilst the rest of the computing device is in standby or is shutdown and the application state information may include details of the files that are to be downloaded.