Anyone out there with a SP4 Core M model to share battery life experiences?

[Emka Zwo]

Moin! (As we say in Hamburg for "Hello")
I am really interested in your Core M battery life experiences. How long is the usage? Is there a significant improvement in comparism to Core i models?

 

[DocACE911]

4.2 hours using just edge and word, 50% screen brightness

Very very disappointing so far. Mind you I have a i7 SP3 with windows 8.1 and use it with office/browsing for over 6 hours straight.

Does not look like indexing service was running. I am baffled. Bad battery or windows 10?

 

[Emka Zwo]

Uh, sounds awful! That would be less than I read about the actual i5 models. And battery life would perhaps be the only good reason tu choose a core m model.
Maybe other processes running in the background? OneDrive or OneNote downloading? All critical updates made?
Would be happy about your future experiences...

 

[leeshor]

You won't be able to get this without a lot of adjusting work but I'm getting 7+ hours on an i5 4 128. 50% brightness with auto bright disabled and NOT using Edge. Firefox is now my default and it's much easier on the battery. I have made a lot of other adjustments to get to that point. However, WiFi, blue tooth (also using a BT mouse) and location services are all on. Those typically use quite a bit of battery.

 

[Emka Zwo]

Funny, just read this test review that says, that the MS browsers are the best in battery saving...

Which browser will make your battery last longer in Windows 10?

 

[leeshor]

MUI IE was great at battery use. My results on Edge and Firefox are absolutely reversed from theirs. On a fairly clean system Edge is even worse than that.

 

[DocACE911]

For these devices to work and recommed to family members they need to work out of the box. I forgot how much effort I put into tweaking my i7/SP3 to make it run well, always sleep etc - why I am not upgrading to 10 as I scared.

I thought since these were built with windwos 10 MS would have "tweaked it". But they have PREFETCH enabled? INDEXING enabled?WTF.

Samsung turns off these surfaces for their SSD's on install.

 

[MattL]

Surface Pro 4 M3 vs Surface 3 Battery Test • /r/Surface

 

[leeshor]

For these devices to work and recommed to family members they need to work out of the box. I forgot how much effort I put into tweaking my i7/SP3 to make it run well, always sleep etc - why I am not upgrading to 10 as I scared.

I thought since these were built with windwos 10 MS would have "tweaked it". But they have PREFETCH enabled? INDEXING enabled?WTF.

Samsung turns off these surfaces for their SSD's on install.

No they don't, at least not when I install them. Only after you have installed Magician and told it to.

 

[DocACE911]

Well, true - but magician is pretty slick and enables the full features of the drive like RAM cache etc.

ANyway even if indexing can speed things up 1%, why not ONLY let the service run when plugged in? Why suck battery life? Why let onedrive max out the CPU indexing on the battery and not just limit it to save battery life until plugged in?

 

[leeshor]

I saw something on optimizing the Surface somewhere the other day. It suggested being selective about what syncs to OneDrive (or) turn syncing on during off hours.

 

[GreyFox7]

I'm running with battery saver on from 100% with screen at 25%, Bluetooth off, everything but the essentials off. I'm down to 54% in just over 3.5 hours. Core m. All this didn't even make much if any difference.

I switched Cortana off because she was the top CPU user in App history.