Real World Battery Life

[Christian Kallevig]

I believe you can set it so Windows Defender simply doesn't start up with Windows.

 

[Jeff Woods]

burning 70% battery life while...

Burning 70% battery life while playing Facebook games on the IE explore and surfing the web for 4 hours total time, Is this normal?
I feel this is not, and wanted to get some feedback if this is normal or so. Because I am ready to exchange this surface 2 for the fear of a faulty battery. I have one more day before my 15 day return\exchange is up at beat buy. What are your guys' feeling about this.

 

[WillysJeepMan]

Re: burning 70% battery life while...

Burning 70% battery life while playing Facebook games on the IE explore and surfing the web for 4 hours total time, Is this normal?
I feel this is not, and wanted to get some feedback if this is normal or so. Because I am ready to exchange this surface 2 for the fear of a faulty battery. I have one more day before my 15 day return\exchange is up at beat buy. What are your guys' feeling about this.

I think that is probably normal. What I'm discovering about the RT (Surface 2 should be better) is that the Surface is optimized for media playback. If I continuously play videos (.m4v, .mp4 format) off of a microSD card I get well over 10 hours of use. If I surf the web, I'll get closer to 6-7 hours. Putting the Surface in standby I'm noticing anywhere between 3-5% battery drain over night.

Going to the desktop and running Task Manager, I've seen many processes still running. Apps that I had started since booting up show up in the list even though I closed them out (by a downward swipe). I need to do some investigation as to whether or not those dormant entries have an effect on battery life.

 

[Jeff Woods]

I think that is probably normal. What I'm discovering about the RT (Surface 2 should be better) is that the Surface is optimized for media playback. If I continuously play videos (.m4v, .mp4 format) off of a microSD card I get well over 10 hours of use. If I surf the web, I'll get closer to 6-7 hours. Putting the Surface in standby I'm noticing anywhere between 3-5% battery drain over night.

Going to the desktop and running Task Manager, I've seen many processes still running. Apps that I had started since booting up show up in the list even though I closed them out (by a downward swipe). I need to do some investigation as to whether or not those dormant entries have an effect on battery life.

that actually makes me happy to hear. That's about what I average for an over night drain too. And I know I could get about 2 hours more of use with 30 % left too (give or take). I think I am being to hard on this thing comparing it to my iPad two. Which can go almost a whole 12 hours and only burn about 50% or so. And I also realize ita essentially a stripped down computer as well. Which is going to demand more power then the likes of an iPad. Well I guess I won't bother exchanging it. Plus there a 1 year limited manufacture warranty. So if there is anything wrong with the battery alls not lost. Right?

 

[HeyCori]

But remember that the iPad 2 is only rocking a 1024x768 resolution. The higher the resolution the more juice it sucks.

 

[malberti1993]

They seem to have a fix for the original surface rt.
Microsoft Surface RT and Surface 2 battery and power | Recharge Surface
Scroll to the bottom
Not sure if it works with the surface 2.

 

[HeyCori]

They seem to have a fix for the original surface rt.
Microsoft Surface RT and Surface 2 battery and power | Recharge Surface
Scroll to the bottom
Not sure if it works with the surface 2.

I used their tip to let my battery drain below 10% before charging and I swear it improved the battery. Or that could just all be in my head. :grin:

 

[malberti1993]

I used their tip to let my battery drain below 10% before charging and I swear it improved the battery. Or that could just all be in my head. :grin:

I always let it run down to around 10 percent if not let it fully die than charge it.

EDIT: Been using my surface more and more, and notice in the task manager sometime the windows search filter ( which is the service that index your file and stuff) is running and uses alot of resources with it. This is while i was browsing the web. I disabled the service but that made windows search really really slow. So i put it back on. Anyways, when this runs in the background, battery life takes a big hit.

 

[kristalsoldier]

I always let it run down to around 10 percent if not let it fully die than charge it.

EDIT: Been using my surface more and more, and notice in the task manager sometime the windows search filter ( which is the service that index your file and stuff) is running and uses alot of resources with it. This is while i was browsing the web. I disabled the service but that made windows search really really slow. So i put it back on. Anyways, when this runs in the background, battery life takes a big hit.

This is interesting. Got to pay attention to this. They should have set it up in such a way that when the Surface is on battery, it should stop doing the indexing and resume only when attached to the mains.

 

[SwimSwim]

Guys what I been noticing is that sometimes when i browse the web and using word, the device would not get warm and other times it would get warm to touch (usually when it gets warm battery life decreases faster.) I usually browse around forum sites. I think there is alot of stuff running in the background at certain times. It Schedules to do maintence and dont forget WINDOWS DEFENDER does automatically do scans everyday. So I think thats something to look at. Is there a way to stop windows defender from doing scans?

It's considered a maintenance task, so whenever your Surface is set to perform maintenance (check via the Action Center), that's when it'll scan.

I believe you can set it so Windows Defender simply doesn't start up with Windows.

If you it on start-up, then real time protection won't be enabled. Granted, I suppose that's not the biggest issue for a Surface 2, seeing as it runs Windows RT, but nonetheless, you lose real time protection until you re-enable automatic start up, or manually open it while logged in. It's you decision to decide whether or not that's and issue, but it's just a heads up.

 

[SwimSwim]

Re: burning 70% battery life while...

Going to the desktop and running Task Manager, I've seen many processes still running. Apps that I had started since booting up show up in the list even though I closed them out (by a downward swipe). I need to do some investigation as to whether or not those dormant entries have an effect on battery life.

That's actually a new "feature" on Windows 8.1 (and not, the quotes are not saying it's bad, they just mean it's not widely published). When you close an app, it won't fully close. Instead, it's "tombstoned," where the app and it's processes are suspended to where they're not using system resources, but also not lost either. This means that you can close an app, not have any adverse affect on your system performance, and still come back days later and pick up right where you left off. And should you open up anything particularly resource hungry (like a graphic intense game that eats up RAM), Windows will automatically remove the tombstoned app to make the memory available to the rest of the system (this can be done manually by closing the app via the Task Manager).

This is exactly how it works on Windows Phone. It's also very similar to how hibernating works on Windows 7, where the session is cached, yet not utilizing power. It's pretty neat, and I've thus far not seen any adverse affect on battery life or performance. And again, should it be bothering you, you can always kill them manually via the Task Manager.

 

[tripleM87]

My Surface 2 looses 1% per hour when it's in standby during nighttime and wifi is switched on. When I go into flight mode, it looses nearly nothing. You can turn off notifications during nighttime in settings, maybe microsoft should give the possibility, to turn off wifi as well, or bring out a firmware update, that lowers the idel power consumption of wifi. It is advertised to have a standby time of 7-15 days, with wifi on I would only get 4 days..

 

[HeyCori]

Has anyone noticed a change in battery life after today's firmware update? I won't be able to download until after work.

 

[malberti1993]

It's considered a maintenance task, so whenever your Surface is set to perform maintenance (check via the Action Center), that's when it'll scan.

.

Not true, even when its not in maintence mode. SOMETIMES it still appears in task manager and uses 25 percent of the cpu.

 

[JKing106]

Um, it's common knowledge that devices with lithium ion batteries need to be discharged periodically.

 

[Gorgan8]

Hi guys! Not sure where to ask about powercfg question but since this is on battery, I might as well ask it here.

so, last week (I bought mine on last Tuesday) when I use powercfg battery report to check my usage, the report showed all the detail without any problem. But lately when I use powercfg report, it didn't show any information from usage history section to the estimated usage section. Is there anything wrong with it? It's bugging me.

 

[christenmartin]

I have seen an improvement with battery life with the latest updates. Anybody?

 

[louser]

Noob question, but how do you do a powercfg report? I assumed you type that in the run command box but when I do nothing happens.

 

[kristalsoldier]

I have seen an improvement with battery life with the latest updates. Anybody?

I do too. Though I am almost afraid to say so. Who knows what the next update will bring. In fact, I will go to the extent of saying that as things currently stand - touch wood - the Surface 2 is at its optimized best. The fluidity of the screen is very good. The battery is as advertised. The WiFi works well. Apps open and close quickly. And, the keyboard is functioning smoothly.

 

[Gergolos]

Noob question, but how do you do a powercfg report? I assumed you type that in the run command box but when I do nothing happens.

Hey there, yep that's right. You have to type "powercfg /batteryreport". After that your Surface should create a html file showing all the Information you need about your battery. (it is saved here: C:\Users\Username\battery-report.html)


@all:

So guys, I wanted to test my Surface (bought a few days ago) battery today, so I let it play some documentaries on YouTube all the day. I startet at 07:11am with 100% and ended my "experiment" at 04:28pm with 4% charge. During that period of time the battery charge went down by 10% per hour. So it was quite nice to see that after 9h 20m it had used 96% of the charge... I think that's quite ok for a tablet... I watched all of the YouTube videos with my wifi-connection. So wifi was on... Display was set at ~25% brightness (that's what I normally use)

I even scanned some documents (my scanner was powered by the usb connection from my Surface entirely)...

Here is a screenshot with some of the data from today (cycle count = 5 btw. maximum charge: 30mWh)
edit: as one can see on the graph the discharge speed was quite stabile. As I mentioned it was about 10%/hour