Battery dying overnight

[swindmiller]

My battery seems to be draining overnight. For example I use my SP2 plugged in and charged up to 100%. Unplug it, put it to sleep and go to bed. The next night I go to use it and I am at 10%. How can I find out what is draining it?

Some background but dont know if its relevant. I use my surface for work so I use the dock and its plugged in during the day. I really should not have to charge at night at all except the weekends.
Sometimes when I take it out of my bag for work in the morning its hot...I assume because its on all night for some reason. I have it set to sleep after 5min on battery.

Thanks,
Scott

 

[leeshor]

We have a thread here that may help but you seem to have something doing some checking in the background.

 

[swindmiller]

Does tha only work for the SP3 or will it work for the 2 as well?
I haven't tried it yet but it looks like that is for the 3.

Thanks
Scott

 

[leeshor]

Much of those tips apply to any Surface and most other battery operated devices including phones.

 

[Philtastic]

Actually, I suspect that you have the "auto wake from sleep" bug that at least a few of us have. If you open command prompt and run the command "powercfg /batteryreport", it will make an html file containing info on your battery health and usage. You will see a table that shows the times that it was on battery, such as overnight. What you will possibly find is that your device wakes up exactly 40 seconds after you apparently put it to sleep and then stays awake until you find it drained of its battery. It's really annoying. The only thing that has consistently prevented this from happening for me is to either not have the type cover attached or don't close it for roughly 10 seconds after hitting sleep.

 

[GreyFox7]

Or you may have a rogue process consuming high CPU resources while the computer is idle.

 

[Philtastic]

Or you may have a rogue process consuming high CPU resources while the computer is idle.

See, he put it to sleep: it shouldn't just wake up and start doing things. And once whatever woke it up finishes, it should go back to sleep automatically.

 

[grumpy]

See, he put it to sleep: it shouldn't just wake up and start doing things. And once whatever woke it up finishes, it should go back to sleep automatically.

Well, it is not unprecedented for the SP2 to spontaneously wake and not go back to sleep. There was a period of "bad" firmwares that would cause some SP2s to wake when transitioning from sleep to hibernation. I was not able to enable hibernation (and have it function reliably) until about February or March.

To see what woke the device:
powercfg /lastwake

To see what might be preventing it from sleeping:
powercfg /requests

You can also peruse the system logs to try and determine what is going on.

 

[GreyFox7]

OR powercfg /sleepstudy should pull out the culprit.

 

[Philtastic]

Interesting, didn't know of those commands. My auto-wake 40 seconds after putting it to sleep is caused by the Intel USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller according to the "lastwake" command. Maybe this is somewhat an extension of the issue of having a microSD card or USB device plugged in but, instead of causing high CPU usage, it's causing waking? Figures that Microsoft would fix one problem only to cause another....

 

[swindmiller]

Thanks for all the replies. I think the Sleepstudy and Batteryreport commands are for the Sp3 only. The Batteryreport ran and resulted in an html that would not open in IE or Firefox (I tried it twice).
This is the result of all the commands above:

C:\windows\system32>powercfg /sleepstudy
Connected Standby is not supported on this machine. Cannot run tool.


C:\windows\system32>powercfg /lastwake
Wake History Count - 1
Wake History [0]
Wake Source Count - 0


C:\windows\system32>powercfg /requests
DISPLAY:
None.
SYSTEM:
[DRIVER] \FileSystem\srvnet
An active remote client has recently sent requests to this machine.
[PROCESS] \Device\HarddiskVolume4\Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmpnetwk.ex
e
Media Sharing has been enabled through Windows Media Player.
AWAYMODE:
None.
EXECUTION:
[SERVICE] \Device\HarddiskVolume4\Windows\System32\SearchIndexer.exe (WSearch)
Windows Search is indexing
[PROCESS] \Device\HarddiskVolume4\Windows\System32\wuauclt.exe
PERFBOOST:
None.

C:\windows\system32>powercfg /batteryreport
Battery life report saved to C:\windows\system32\battery-report.html.


Thanks for everyone who is helping me. What else can I try?

 

[swindmiller]

Looks like I was running batteryreport wrong I also tried this command:

powercfg /energy /output %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\battery_report2.html

Trying to attach the file but noticed this:

System Availability Requests:System Required Request
The program has made a request to prevent the system from automatically entering sleep.
Requesting Process \Device\HarddiskVolume4\Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmpnetwk.exe

Could that be the problem?


EDIT: Here is the full file: http://pastebin.com/q86VMmhc for the life of me I cannot figure out how to attach the html file

Thanks,
Scott