surfacebookinuk
Member
Well mine was clearly brand new and the upper grey part was unglued from both sides from the moment I unpacked it so I wouln't expect something better from a refurb unit.
Battery Life, is this normal?
- Thread starter mattmg
- Start date
Hi,
iam also not happy with the battery life.
I turned my Surface 4 Pro with i5 and 512GB SSD on, and it is now running apprx 30 minutes.
I lost 17% prcet of battery with doing this:
Checking Email with Outlook 2016 -> connected to Hosted Exchange.
Running Kayako App for checking my daily work (Ticketsystem and Realtime visitor check)
Opened Excel for my passwords
And slack is running.
I viewed a couple of minutes zattoo.com (Streaming TV) and closed it after that.
Now iam writing on MS Edge to this forum, and lost 1% with writing this post.
I have no idea if this is normal draining or not.
No CPU burner found in taskmanager. All looks ok.
My Macbook from last year is quite better.
Any feedback will be appreciate.
iam also not happy with the battery life.
I turned my Surface 4 Pro with i5 and 512GB SSD on, and it is now running apprx 30 minutes.
I lost 17% prcet of battery with doing this:
Checking Email with Outlook 2016 -> connected to Hosted Exchange.
Running Kayako App for checking my daily work (Ticketsystem and Realtime visitor check)
Opened Excel for my passwords
And slack is running.
I viewed a couple of minutes zattoo.com (Streaming TV) and closed it after that.
Now iam writing on MS Edge to this forum, and lost 1% with writing this post.
I have no idea if this is normal draining or not.
No CPU burner found in taskmanager. All looks ok.
My Macbook from last year is quite better.
Any feedback will be appreciate.
Why would you compare it to a MacBook instead of what you should realistically be expecting from a surface device?
I cannot comment on what the apps in that list would do, although it's quite a few apps and I do not know what they may be doing in the background.
The 1% thing is rather irrelevant and means nothing.
I cannot comment on what the apps in that list would do, although it's quite a few apps and I do not know what they may be doing in the background.
The 1% thing is rather irrelevant and means nothing.
surfacebookinuk
Member
well just continue doing what you are doing until the battery falls to nearly 0 and see how many hours you got. For me the first half hour I turn it on it would go to 90-89%. Then steadily decline based on my usage.
This is a thread about the performance of the surface's battery, in terms of if it is performing as the manufacturer intended. Not a thread comparing battery life between various devices. Very different topics.
The life of a battery, sounds like it should be a novel. no mater what I do people are never satisfied. They load me with all sorts of demands and expect me to perform the same as if I was on a walk in the park or sitting idle. Where do they get some of these power hogging Apps good lord these things were written by developers connected directly to the mains of a nuclear power plant. 
I have the identical unit. I get about 5.5 hours of usable battery doing typical office tasks or drawing in Clip Studio. If I'm doing heavy CAD work, or editing video, or playing videos scaled to full screen in Chrome, Firefox, or Plex, while having other things work in the background, I can expect to get only 3-4 hours (roughly 13-17% loss in 30 minutes).
You have to remember that some Windows programs go all the way back to the early 90s, and there are a lot of chipset optimizations which are NOT universally used by 3rd party programs (such as Kayako, slack, zattoo video streaming). Apple threw out every piece of software - and effectively made every vendor re-write their software - when they switched to the OSX code base. OSX also has (imho) a better / more aggressive scheduler which allows applications fewer clock cycles and less access to increase the CPU speed. Still, if you fire up a MBP15 - which has a battery 2.5x the size of the SP4 - you can run it dead flat in 2 hours by simply encoding video using all four CPU cores at 100%.
Here's a great test - exit out of all of your tray applications (anti-virus if you have it, backups, cloud services, etc) and get a local file of an x264 encoded movie (like an MP4). Play that movie using the Microsoft Movies and TV app and see how long the machine lasts. If it's north of 7-8 hours (allowing some spare capacity so as not to drain the battery dead flat, and allow some background processes to run), your unit is normal and the programs YOU are using are causing the problem. You should write the developers and let them know that their apps are burning CPU cycles unnecessarily, and ask if they might optimize future releases for tablet devices with the the Skylake architecture.
Similar threads
