Battery life initially shows 4 or 5 hrs left then sometimes shows over 11 hours, then 3 hrs??

[Garion Brown]

Anyone else noticing this? I have the i7/256/gpu version and my battery life has been horrendous. Only once I have achieved anything close to over 8 hours. Today I actually noticed that about 1 hour after being at 100% charge my battery life showed 5:23 remaining. Put down the computer for a bit and came back and then the battery life showed what I'd expect to see, over 11 hrs remaining?! Look again within next 5 minutes and how shows less than 3hrs?? What is causing this behavior? Is it the gpu switching? I want so much to keep this device but the battery life is not even close to advertised. I'm averaging less than 5 hours after receiving mine on day 1. In addition, I have NOT been doing anything other than browsing, video and office... purposefully. Today I disabled Windows Hello waiting to see if that makes any improvements but I don't' believe it is causing the issues.

 

[coasterfreak212]

I am having the EXACT same issues. I haven't found any way to address it yet. I'm waiting for my local MS store to get their new stock of Surface Books and I'm going to trade mine in.

Sorry I couldn't be of help, but at least it's good to know that someone else is right there with me.

 

[valadon]

I am also seeing the exact same thing. Just web browsing almost no video, very poor battery life. Sometimes it seems to be working well and then suddenly the battery will rapidly drop. Battery life seems to be all over the place and not getting anywhere close to the 12-13 hours that was claimed, it is much closer to 5-6 hours.

 

[zerospace-net]

I've seen the same issue here, too. I think the calculation of time remaining is dependent on what you're doing at the time it makes the calculation. If you're using the SB heavily, it'll go down. If you put it to sleep, it goes up but then drops back down if you start using it again.

Personally, I've been playing Diablo 3 pretty heavily on mine, and with the screen brightness set at 75% and the graphics settings close to max, I get 1-2 hours of playing time before the battery saver kicks on (I have the i5/dGPU model). Right now, the battery life on the SB overall is just marginally better than what I got on my Surface Pro 3 (which is kind of scary given the battery size difference). My SB also gets quite hot while just sitting on my desk charging. I've heard the fan kick on while charging/closed on my desk!

Whatever the cause, I'm definitely NOT seeing anywhere close to the advertised battery life right now. :-(

 

[tedj101]

I find the battery time remaining indicator to be very unreliable (and yes, I have had it start at 2 hours with a full charge and suddenly jump to 11). However, I am pretty happy with the observed battery life rather than that indicated by the Surface Book.

<TED>

 

[carloscentral]

I'm having the "bouncing estimated time left" syndrome as well, however, I'm not sure if it actually correlates to real battery life. I'll start to monitor it. However, I am a bit peeved that I can't ever tell how much battery life I have left because it is never accurate. This is my second SB, the first one had the same issue, albeit to a lesser degree. I just updated the drivers for both batteries to see if that resolves the issue, but so far it doesn't seem to have worked. I'm loving my SB and this may perhaps be the last software nag I have, but I crave a solution badly.

 

[zerospace-net]

I'm loving my SB and this may perhaps be the last software nag I have, but I crave a solution badly.

Same here, pretty much. Unlike some others, I can't bring myself to return my Surface Book despite some of these little nagging issues. I love it so much that I'm just going to remain hopeful that MS will continue to roll out updates to fix all the remaining bugs. SB is the most beautiful, elegant piece of hardware I've ever owned!

 

[spasell]

It's all just based off what activity you are doing at the time. So if you are doing something taxing to the CPU, it'll read less. If you sit idle for a bit, you'll spike back to better hours. What I have noticed is that as the battery gets lower and lower, the times seem to settle and you get a better view of how much is left.

 

[worwig]

I had a lot of data that I wanted to upload to a cloud service. I set the power to never turn off the display, and never sleep, on battery. I pulled the plug and started the upload at about 5:30 last night. At midnight, it had completed, and I had 31% left. That was with the display turned down and no real processing.
I don't see it getting over 10 hours, but I'm OK with 8 or 9 or so. Better than all of my previous PCs.

 

[Neel Tapryal]

Hey guys,

I am experiencing the same exact battery life drain issue.

After a full charge i got only around 4-5 hours of battery life on my I5 256 dGPU surface book and so hopped on a chat with microsoft support.

They made me uninstall the drivers and do a manual 2 button shutdown to see if an auto re-installation of the battery drivers would resolve the issue.

Unfortunately it did not make any difference and the last resort they advised was to do a hard reset of the computer.

Even after doing this i was having the same issue of rapid battery drain and estimated battery life jumping to different numbers every 2 minutes.

So they sent me a new replacement surface book thinking that my device had a defective battery.

Even more infuriating, the NEW surface book that just arrived yesterday is having the SAME problem and this time to an even worse degree.

after a full charge i got 3 hours of battery life with very light-minimal usage on 75% brightness

I am so frustrated and perplexed as this is not even REMOTELY close to what microsoft advertised with the SB battery life.

My crummy old 250$ clearance HP laptop got 2x more battery life than this SB which is supposed to be a premium device that i paid top dollar for.

Not sure what to do now, it cant be that all of our surface books are defective....contemplating whether to try another SB, wait for updates or sadly return the device.

 

[tonyfigcis]

I've had the SurfaceBook only a couple of days but was equally perpelexed regarding the battery life. I've recharged at with around 30% left and it was fine then this morning I plugged it in and Battery 2 charged at 100% and the overall batter was at 51% with Battery 1 one not charging. I don't know what happened, I tried different outlets and left it plugged in hoping it was a temporary glitch.

The rest of the notebook is great and love the dual functionality between tablet and laptop but I'm hopeful something gets done soon to fix the battery life.

Good luck!

 

[zerospace-net]

Hey guys,

I am experiencing the same exact battery life drain issue.

After a full charge i got only around 4-5 hours of battery life on my I5 256 dGPU surface book and so hopped on a chat with microsoft support.

They made me uninstall the drivers and do a manual 2 button shutdown to see if an auto re-installation of the battery drivers would resolve the issue.

Unfortunately it did not make any difference and the last resort they advised was to do a hard reset of the computer.

Even after doing this i was having the same issue of rapid battery drain and estimated battery life jumping to different numbers every 2 minutes.

So they sent me a new replacement surface book thinking that my device had a defective battery.

Even more infuriating, the NEW surface book that just arrived yesterday is having the SAME problem and this time to an even worse degree.

after a full charge i got 3 hours of battery life with very light-minimal usage on 75% brightness

I am so frustrated and perplexed as this is not even REMOTELY close to what microsoft advertised with the SB battery life.

My crummy old 250$ clearance HP laptop got 2x more battery life than this SB which is supposed to be a premium device that i paid top dollar for.

Not sure what to do now, it cant be that all of our surface books are defective....contemplating whether to try another SB, wait for updates or sadly return the device.

I have the i5/256/dGPU Surface Book as well. At 75% brightness (the setting I use when playing Diablo 3 -- with the graphics settings nearly maxed in the game), I get 2-3 hours of gaming time before the battery saver kicks in (I usually notice it because the screen dims). Playing PC games is hard on the batteries between the GPU running full steam and the screen brightness up, though. When just surfing, playing casual games like Solitaire, etc, I keep my screen at 50% brightness and probably get 8 or so hours out of the batteries. Your 3 hours with "minimal" usage does not seem normal, so I'm starting to wonder what you mean by minimal usage, since it's happened to you on 2 different units.

I'm not sure it's the Surface Book that's defective, so much as it seems that it might be a power management issue with the Surface hardware and Windows 10. Other Surface owners running Windows 10 have complained about the drop in battery life on their devices as well since upgrading to Win10 (one of the reasons I still haven't updated my SP3 to Windows 10).

 

[g808]

Battery issues here too. All updates installed and I only got 4 hours of usage today after a 60% battery drain. This is at 75% screen brightness and doing basic tasks like mail, web browning and some YouTube. Not using Chrome either.

 

[Neel Tapryal]

yea its totally unacceptable.

really confused on what to do.

Do you guys think a microsoft update can really fix such a gaping problem or is low battery life just the reality we have to face and accept??

Does anyone know if ALL SB users are experiencing this issue or its juts a certain few and all others are getting the promised 9-12 hours?

If so it could be a certain batch of SB that were manufactured with a battery issue that we all happened to receive from

 

[Neel Tapryal]

yea its totally unacceptable.

really confused on what to do.

Do you guys think a microsoft update can really fix such a gaping problem or is low battery life just the reality we have to face and accept??

Does anyone know if ALL SB users are experiencing this issue or its juts a certain few and all others are getting the promised 9-12 hours?

If so it could be a certain batch of SB that were manufactured with a battery issue that we all happened to receive from

whats even weirder is that on 95% battery life it says my estimated time of usage is only 3 hours and that turned out to be just about true (only using office and chrome)

 

[aalupatti]

I am going to test out mine today... I easily get more than 6 hours combined usage but not sure about the 9 to 12hrs

 

[Garf Leonard]

The battery indicator will get more accurate over time, the Surface Pros all did this if I remember. Yes, some of it can be "fixed" with updates, but the estimate remaining can vary depending on load, a lot of which you may not even realize the surface book is doing (downloading updates, indexing, scans).

 

[Neel Tapryal]

please let us know the outcome of ur test

 

[mcheiron]

In my experience, using Office only, the SB (i5 256GB) is lasting rather long, for sure longer than my SP3, I would guess 8-9 hours.

As soon as I surf on the internet, especially WindowsCentral with all its moving ads, the CPU is running at 30-40% and the battery life prediction is dropping to 1/4th of the value using office.

 

[Neel Tapryal]

hmm so some users are getting the expected 8-9 hours of battery life while others of use are barely getting half of that.

Do you suggests we get replacement devices or hope that microsoft will roll out an update that increases the battery life sometime in the near future.

My window for returning the device is coming up so need to make a decision somewhat soon