Surface Pro 2 battery life on desktop

dsp4

New member
Jan 19, 2013
5
0
0
Visit site
I've been wondering how's the battery life of other SP2 owners.

I've been using mine since launch and never got much more than 4 hours out of it. The funny thing is it doesn't really matter what I'm doing. Whether I'm playing GPU-bound games, using Photoshop or strictly browsing the web, it doesn't make much difference. I spend much of my time on the desktop, use Chrome, and the screen brightness is set to auto.

What are your experiences? Anyone actually got 7+ hours of desktop use like the review sites are claiming?
 

MBytes

New member
Oct 28, 2013
521
0
0
Visit site
Chrome is not laptop/tablet friendly. It's the worst web browser you can get for any slow system, and battery powered devices. Known fact.
Really sucks... I hope that Google fixes this in the near future. But the current version, that is the case.
Try Firefox, if you don't want IE11. Also, Firefox current Beta version, has a Modern UI app. Currently no support for plugins (just HTML5), but hey, pretty cool none the less :)

Beside that, make sure you don't have any background program doing stuff, or Windows doing maintenance work (see Action Center to know). I think you installed something that eats your battery life.
 

dsp4

New member
Jan 19, 2013
5
0
0
Visit site
Yeah, I've heard bad things about Chrome and battery life too. Switching browsers isn't an option though, I'd be giving up too much. I wanted to keep Metro IE for casual browsing, and keep using Chrome on the desktop, but Win 8 prevents you from using any browser other than the default one in Metro (which I hope they fix).

Do you own a SP? I'm really curious about the battery life people are getting and the settings they're using.

For now, I ended up disabling auto-brightness and dropping it to about 40%, disabling Bluetooth, and setting the power plan to "Power Saver". That helped a lot, but I'm still wondering how that compares to other SP2s, just to see if it represents typical performance, or if I ended up with a faulty battery.
 

Hisoka Te Magician

New member
Oct 24, 2013
12
0
0
Visit site
anyone tryed some games? i tryed world of warcraft today and i had 50% battery, in 40 mins my battery dropped at 10% (balanced profile) is that normal? if i had 100% i would have played only for under 2 hours!
is my pro2 with problems or is normal with games?(settings of the game were at medium)
 

Nerih

New member
Jun 21, 2013
3
0
0
Visit site
I have the surface pro 2 512gb UKI version.

I use it for doing demo's using window 2008 vm's (occasionally)
laptop replacement on the go (mostly)

gaming eats my batter fairly quickly. i load tested the machine and got around 2hrs out of it - so almost in line with 50% drop in approx 1 hour (note the approximate before busting my chops on maths)

if i do note taking, with 20% screen brightness and one note set to max battery performance (check options), then the battery indicator tells me between 8 and 13 hours. Obviously i've not tested if it will last that long, but seeing the CPU throttle down to low MHZ and WIFI on such low power makes me think that it is fairly realistic.

this is on balanced
 

badMojo69

New member
Apr 24, 2012
612
0
0
Visit site
After checking the battery log, I'm only getting about 4 hours before getting the 10% warning. I've had it since day two and have all the latest updates. I don't do much more than surf... yes I bought a SP2 to surf. Why, because I have the RT. :). Oh and my brightness is around 58-68%. Just depends on how much light is in the room.
 

chezm

New member
Apr 9, 2013
1,364
0
0
Visit site
I definitely don't get past 7 hours. But when my device is used, I'm running some power x86/apps so I'm not surprised. I would say I probably get 6 hours, if I was less CPU intensive I think I would usually get 7-8. The battery life isn't what i thought i'd get, but I can't say I'm disappointed...I'm happy with the overall battery consumption... personally.
 

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
322,736
Messages
2,242,598
Members
427,978
Latest member
Duouser3