How's your battery life?

[boltman2013]

It works great get the m3 and tweak it do not get the i5 or i7 ..the sweet spot is M3 you can get the battery they advertise I'm still at 65% nearly two hours in heavy use.

 

[rocketboy]

I actually believe that this is a Windows 10 issue. I was here griping about dramatic battery life drop off for my SP2 not 24 hours after updating from Win8.1. It had all the symptoms that people talk about with the SP4 - hot, fan on a lot, powering on with very little battery if left sleeping overnight, etc.

I was really on the fence about rolling back to Win 8.1 but ended up trusting in fixes with mixed results. After a few days of use, the heat and constant fan on situations seemed to die down. It's almost as if Win10 needed to do a truck ton of computationally intensive tasks for the first dozen hours or so and then is fine. The SP2 is my secondary computer so doesn't get as much use so this was really annoying for days.

I tried disabling flash on edge, I tried toggling to battery saver, but in the end I can't be sure that anything I did really affected the heat/fan issue. It just seemed to go away after a while.

The sleep/hibernation thing didn't go away. I've got my SP2 on hibernate now. It recovers so fast I don't really notice much of a difference. I think Win10 sleep is just broken. It's almost unbelievable, but with along with the UI changes, I don't think MS had tablets as priority for Win10 and that's why we see these types of issues.

 

[boltman2013]

I think its the SP 2 is not the priority ...get 3 or 4

 

[GatsbyGlen]

According to the sleep study report, the WP WiFi Background Scanning Client is a big offender for me. My device is setup to go to sleep, and then after 2 hours, goes into hibernation. I'm going to turn off the setting that says to use WiFi during sleep, and then shorten the amount of time before going into hibernation to maybe 30 minutes. I'm still surprised by the lack of options available in "Power Options -> Advanced Settings".

 

[boltman2013]

I have wifi during sleep off too if on battery, I too am surprised in less options but there are enough to twaek a good result out of the box the power setting are basically set to High Performance that needs to be tweaked down to get the battery life you expect and need in a device like this.

The display is good enough the lower settings are absolutely fine still and then when plugged in I go back to near High performance.

 

[GatsbyGlen]

Thanks. Are these the only power options people are seeing?

 

[boltman2013]

Thanks. Are these the only power options people are seeing?

View attachment 115604

Yes

 

[RicKaysen]

Odd...I've been seeing on average 4.5 hours remaining on a 100% charge. Didn't do much besides disabling Chrome at startup. Just now I see 8.5 hours remaining at 100%. Not actually believing it's accurate, but wonder why the difference.

 

[RicKaysen]

It just jumped to 9 hours 20 minutes, then to 7.5 and within minutes back to 4.5....bizarre. So, my take away is the "time remaining" thing is completely useless.

 

[GatsbyGlen]

I think the estimate is based on previous drains, so the estimate should get more accurate over time, based on how you use the device.

 

[GatsbyGlen]

i5/8/256

Some info. I used Skype today for 1 hour, 10 minutes. According to the battery report, I went from 43 to 6 % in that time (got the battery notification warning). During that time there was no fan at all, and I had chrome running in the background. I'm using the Desktop version of Skype, not the Windows app.

However, after plugging in, the fan did kick on while the battery was charging, stayed on for a bit, and then turned off. Nothing out of the ordinary I guess.

One thing I found interesting with CPU-Z is that the processor more often than not was at around 2.8 Ghz (28 x 100) while Skype was running with video call. I'll have to spend some time logging CPU utilization, particularly during battery time, to see how high it gets.

 

[FXi2]

It would help if owners would end their posts with the model they are posting about. Bigger memory or higher vs lower spec CPU has of course an impact on interpreting your experiences. ��

 

[RicKaysen]

I meant to do that, but forgot. i5/256

 

[GatsbyGlen]

I meant to do that, but forgot. i5/256

Same here

 

[Hardcore1973]

The battery will not give you real data until it has been discharged a couple of times so the software know how much battery you really have left. That is why when I buy a new device I actually run it till dead (sometimes they will sit at 1-3% for an hour or more. Then the battery will be pretty accurate.