Real World Battery Life

[mcheiron]

Okay, I exchanged my surface and am still only getting 5-6 hours: surfing, video conferencing with Skype, Netflix or YouTube. When skyping, the battery drops the fastest with 20-30% per hour. The screen brightness is only set to 50%. What am I doing different than all of you who get 7, 10 or even more hours of battery life?

I thought the surface 2 is an improvement battery wise over the RT, but mine isn't., even the replacement. Btw, Bestbuy said that this was the first return at their store, so I am glad to hear that, but bumped that there is something wrong here.

 

[Vallos]

The Surface Pro 2 received a firmware update that improved battery life, so it seems Microsoft needs to do one for the Surface 2.

 

[SwimSwim]

Noticed that my battery drains pretty fast too. I was dropping around 12-13% an hour. That's mostly from web browsing and Office. Also had a few games suspended in the background. With drainage like that I couldn't imagine getting anything more than 7-10 hours out of mines. I also don't employ any battery saving techniques either. WiFi and Bluetooth stays on. I also heavily use my Bluetooth keyboard as well. Screen brightness never dips below 100% either. I can't tell if that's common or if something's wrong.

Typically, the battery life listed by a manufacturer is always 50% screen brightness or lower, because they know listing the results at 100% brightness won't be very impressive.

 

[hcrick]

Are you guys using it outdoors or is the screen not very bright? I found max brightness on the RT and Pro 1/2 to be way too bright.

 

[HeyCori]

Are you guys using it outdoors or is the screen not very bright? I found max brightness on the RT and Pro 1/2 to be way too bright.

The screen just looks dim to me when it's not at 100%

 

[HeyCori]

Update: I fear my battery life may be worse than previously imagined. This thing is dropping a percentage point every couple of minutes. I've lost nearly 20% with barely an hour of web browsing, and that wasn't even consecutive usage. The MS support page says that we should let the battery dip below 10% every so often. Wondering if I should do the same now or let it completely drain before the next charge.

 

[christenmartin]

Update: I fear my battery life may be worse than previously imagined. This thing is dropping a percentage point every couple of minutes. I've lost nearly 20% with barely an hour of web browsing, and that wasn't even consecutive usage. The MS support page says that we should let the battery dip below 10% every so often. Wondering if I should do the same now or let it completely drain before the next charge.

I'm going on a week and a half of use, and I'm not seeing necessarily an increase in battery life (mines been good 10 +) but It has been up and down. as with the phones, and every other tablet I have owned, I bet it will take a bit for it to level off. That being said 20% an hour sucks. Nothing but up buddy.

 

[Christian Kallevig]

I haven't had time to do a proper test, but it seems even with Bluetooth off as Microsoft's tech support recommended to me and screen brightness sitting at around 25% I am still in the 6-7 hour range (extrapolating from two hours of near constant use).

I just don't get why this is. I suppose I should attempt turning off all of the synching just to see if that has an effect.

If not I'm going to have to drive to the Microsoft store and ask for an exchange.

 

[malberti1993]

Have you guys checked your services running in the background. I was doing a simple web browsing on ie and i ran task manager to see what was eating up my cpu and the search service was eating up a constant 25 percent of my cpu. When you guys are noticing the rapid drain, see if the back of the device top right in landscape mode is hot.

We should post a list of services that we can safety disable.

 

[Christian Kallevig]

I have noticed that portion of the tablet gets warm, though not quite hot. But then again, my battery drain problem is not terribly severe.

And no, I have not actually looked at what services are running. Only applications to make sure that I hadn't left anything suspended. I'll have to check that... Hmm, I'm immediately noticing that Skype is eating up double the memory of anything else.... Stupid Skype! And then that's followe by Netflix, which apparently is also a hog. But even between the two of them it's only about 130MB of memory usage. The other gigabyte or so is all being eaten up by Windows. My CPU usage is unremarkable (hovering around 1%), and disk usage is likewise minimal. I'll try disabling some services and see if it gets me anywhere

 

[Jeff Woods]

Okay so I just ran a movie on Netflix for 1:11 which only took 11% battery. But I used my surface for about 2 to 3 hours that took about 25 to 30%. Does that sound about on par on the battery life consumption.

 

[jonathanrn]

That sounds about right. Mobile devices are really good at decoding video and playing it. Some have chips in there designed to so just that super-efficiently. Surfing the web on the other hand can involve a lot of processing power to render web pages. Those numbers you gave out are plausible. Some tech sites use HD video playback as a benchmark for battery testing. That time is usually higher than a web page cycle battery test.

 

[GreatCanadian]

If I am correct then you should get over 9 hours. You watched video for over an hour. Then you said that 2 hours used 25% of your battery.That 2 hours *4 = 8 hours. Plus your 1 hour for video. That's 9 hours. That ain't no perfect math by no means, but it seems to be a fairly close estimate to me.

 

[HeyCori]

If I am correct then you should get over 9 hours. You watched video for over an hour. Then you said that 2 hours used 25% of your battery.That 2 hours *4 = 8 hours. Plus your 1 hour for video. That's 9 hours. That ain't no perfect math by no means, but it seems to be a fairly close estimate to me.

Yeah, I was reading Anandtech's review and their web browser battery life test squeaked out 8 hours for the S2 and around 6.8 hours for the S1. But while I'm actually using my S2 it doesn't seem like I have any hope of making it to 8 hours. If I was losing 10% an hour then I wouldn't worry too much, but I'm losing closer to 20% an hour. That seems excessive or that could just be what happens when I leave my brightness at max and leave bluetooth on, lol.

I haven't charged my Surface 2 since about 8 o'clock yesterday. I currently have about 15% battery left. However, that's less than 2 hours of web browsing. I couldn't imagine making it to 4 hours.

 

[photobriangray]

Yesterday, I did two hours of browsing and a four hour session of Remote Desktop and used 60% of the battery. I have checked my powercfg battery report and have projected battery life ranges from 6 to 10 hours.

Connected standby does take some battery when idle. You can check which apps are allowed to update and limit to just those you use in PC Setting/Search and Apps. There are new features in 8.1 that can effect battery life that were not present in 8 RT on the Surface 1.

 

[TheSuperShoe]

I notice mine says that the firmware doesn't support any of the S# sleep states and the WiFi doesn't support power saving mode. Is mine in error or does the Tegra 4 not support these things and/or will Microsoft update the firmware to do this?

 

[SwimSwim]

I haven't had time to do a proper test, but it seems even with Bluetooth off as Microsoft's tech support recommended to me and screen brightness sitting at around 25% I am still in the 6-7 hour range (extrapolating from two hours of near constant use).

I just don't get why this is. I suppose I should attempt turning off all of the synching just to see if that has an effect.

If not I'm going to have to drive to the Microsoft store and ask for an exchange.

Wasn't there an odd quirk a few months ago during one of the beta versions of Windows 8.1, where turning on Bluetooth increased battery life, for some odd reason? Perhaps some of that faulty code survived to rebirth itself on some Surface 2 models? It's as I said before, you're getting worse battery life than my Surface Pro 2, which is truly awful.

 

[Christian Kallevig]

I don't think Bluetooth is at all related considering I saw no change in battery life after turning it off.

Tomorrow I'm going to put both my Surface RT and Surface 2 side by side and run some kind of battery test on them to see how they compare. If my RT wins I'm bringing the Surface 2 in to the Microsoft Store on Saturday and getting it exchanged.

 

[HeyCori]

Just did an hour and a half straight of Word. Bluetooth on and WiFi on, nothing running in the background. Started at 99% and ended at 83%. Seems legit. Unfortunately, I don't have my S1 still to do a more direct comparison. But that was just Word. The battery would have drained faster if I mixed in some web browsing.

 

[malberti1993]

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?