How's your battery life?

[MartyB]

I've seen a number of complaints regarding battery life, a lot of them coming from people with a similar setup to mine: i5/8GB/256GB. In my specific case, I get about 4.5 hrs of actual use. I have a serious problem with battery drain during sleep, which I've solved by using hibernate. I have tried to identify the problem with a powercfg /sleepstudy, which indicates that the device never enters low-power state. I highly recommend that those of you who have a heat/drain problem during sleep try that. Just open a commandline and try powercfg /sleepstudy. It will tell you whether your sleep state is normal (should be 97-100% low power state; I get 0%).

Just to get a handle on the issue, and to figure out whether this is about faulty hardware, I thought I'd see if I could get people to let me know how their battery life is. Just to make sure: I had a serious problem with it, and did a full factory reset, installing nothing but the updates. did not fix my problem.

So, please let me know: what's you battery life, your system configuration, and if you can, does your sleepstudy show anomalies or not.

Here: SP4 i5/8GB/256GB. Battery life with light use: 4.5 hrs. Sleepstudy indicates: 0% in low power state during sleep.

same system as yours and about the same battery use. i hibernate now as sleep does not seem to work

 

[badMojo69]

same system as yours and about the same battery use. i hibernate now as sleep does not seem to work

 

[ttsoldier]

Other people have reported that if they do not use Microsoft Edge browser, they get a lot more battery life.

Have you tried this??

I was having the same battery drain issues and the color shifts and flickering with the Edge browser. So I switched to Internet Explorer as my default browser and today I still have a 35% battery level after right at 7.5 hours of moderate to heavy use. What a difference a day makes!!! I am still experiencing the issues with the touch keyboard just disappearing in the middle of using it. I hope they get this addressed sooner than later because I use the pen for note taking and replying to emails and texts all the time.

Yep, if I don't open Edge, and use other browsers instead, the heat/power issues are kept at bay. There is still some popping in Firefox. But I've had it on intermittently and mostly sleeping for the last 7 hours and only lost 10% of my power.

 

[MartyB]

Should have mentioned that I switched completely from Edge to IE due to same advice. Has made not a shred of difference (except for the occasional BSOD). For comparison to one of the examples you list: I had my SP3 on standby for 47 hours the past few days, while playing with new SP4: it lost 22% of charge. Which is how it should be.

More to the point for this thread: what is your configuration, and how is your battery life? I'm really looking for people's experiences, rather than what they heard someone else said.

 

[ttsoldier]

I have not been able to collect my SP4 as yet. It's there but I cant get it quite yet

Hopefully by the time I get it, firmware and / or driver updates will resolve all these issues

 

[Steven0706]

I got 4.5-5 on average. One surprise is the MATLAB is kind of power saver which did a better job than edge.

 

[Tomer Elias]

Is there an easy way to check how long the use time is?

I use mine for note taking during class on one note, and have chrome open most of the time with 5-10 tabs open. Sometimes I use a little Photoshop.

I'm charging my device to full twice every day, and there is no chance it's getting anywhere near the advertised 9 hours.

 

[Dan Frownfelter]

On the Core m3 (base model) I am getting 8:43 hours running video from the SD card to a TV while also browsing about 2 hours during that time. I'm happy with this significant improvement over my previous SP1.

 

[todkapuz]

My SP4 I5/256 also is getting about 4 hours give or take with 15-30% average cpu utilization. Not exactly what I expected. Would need power during a day of travel by planes for me.

 

[Ghostdad]

sucks. I'm less than 2 hours use today just browsing on chrome no more than 5 tabs at a time. Screen at 25% everything turned on I have 53% left with battery manager saying 2:36, with battery saver on it says 1:58. I dont know wtf thats about.

A reddit forum for surface book suggested reinstalling the MSI file which I did (using the sp4 versio of course) that sees to have made it worse, though maybe im just getting a more accurate estimate since the reinstal. Before the instal battery saver was saying 7 hours at 59%.

 

[MartyB]

Are you using Windows Hello? It sucks down battery life in sleep.

 

[friedmjb]

I'm glad there is a 30 day return policy. I was told at the Microsoft store that I would get 10 hours of battery life. I travel cross-country on a regular basis (5.5 hr flights). Unfortunately, the former US Airways (now American Airlines) does not have power outlets.

I'm going to give Microsoft the 30 days to work out any additional bugs. If I cannot get it up to 8 hours before a recharge, back it goes to Microsoft.

Tangent: speaking about airline travel, is there a privacy screen protector for the SP4?

 

[Arsenic17]

I am getting 4-5 hours on wifi, with web browsing and light programming, on 100% brightness. Not terrible, but come on, WTF MS

 

[bugelrex]

I the poor battery life (if not a bug) is going to give the ipad pro a good opening. Apple claims 10hrs, and they are usually conservative

 

[pdt]

So far, if I use Edge continuously I get 3 hours. If I use Chrome continuously I get 5.5 hours. For more normal (for me) usage, mostly MS Office, I'm getting almost 7 hours. This is all continuous usage without letting the screen turn off. I'm experimenting this weekend with an external battery to see if that will be effective in getting me through a full travel day.

 

[onysi]

I'm also getting 4.5 hrs with the same type of sp4. I'm going to start using IE again just to see how it goes. I'm surprised edge is like this.

 

[ttsoldier]

I'm wondering how much battery life you guys expect from a tablet running a full version of windows with intel's latest processors....

smh...

 

[todkapuz]

I'm wondering how much battery life you guys expect from a tablet running a full version of windows with intel's latest processors....

smh...

I expect what is close to what is advertised. .. I mean 4 hrs is fine... but "Battery Life Up to 9 hours of video playback[1] ([1] Up to 9 hours of video playback. Testing conducted by Microsoft in September 2015 using preproduction Intel? Core™ i5, 256GB, 8GB RAM device. Testing consisted of full battery discharge during video playback. All settings were default except: Wi-Fi was associated with a network. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage, and other factors.) "
While it is possible there are other factors that play into it, video watching on my Surface uses more cpu than the tasks I am doing, using the same exact model.

 

[ttsoldier]

I expect what is close to what is advertised. .. I mean 4 hrs is fine... but "Battery Life Up to 9 hours of video playback[1] ([1] Up to 9 hours of video playback. Testing conducted by Microsoft in September 2015 using preproduction Intel? Core™ i5, 256GB, 8GB RAM device. Testing consisted of full battery discharge during video playback. All settings were default except: Wi-Fi was associated with a network. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage, and other factors.) "
While it is possible there are other factors that play into it, video watching on my Surface uses more cpu than the tasks I am doing, using the same exact model.

While I agree with you, we have to keep in mind that there is a lot of new technology on these devices.. Skylake processors, Windows hello camera etc... Windows 10 would not be optimized for these devices as yet and I am pretty sure that a few driver and firmware patches down the line, everything will be sorted out

This is the price we pay for wanting that bleeding edge technology. The device has not even been out a week yet. I am certain intel and Microsoft are patching things up as we speak

 

[WillysJeepMan]

While I agree with you, we have to keep in mind that there is a lot of new technology on these devices.. Skylake processors, Windows hello camera etc... Windows 10 would not be optimized for these devices as yet and I am pretty sure that a few driver and firmware patches down the line, everything will be sorted out

This is the price we pay for wanting that bleeding edge technology. The device has not even been out a week yet. I am certain intel and Microsoft are patching things up as we speak

One would hope to experience the capabilities as advertised from the beginning of ownership... not hoping that it will be reached at some indeterminate time in the future.

Microsoft has complete control over the software and the hardware. There's no (good) excuse for the SP4 to have this issue out-of-the-gate. Each generation of Surface device (RT and Pro) had similar issues. They should've ironed things out by now... new processor/tech or not.