Fast battery drain issue

[mplatcs]

Hi. I just bought a surface pro 3 i7 256 ssd and very disappointed with it. It works slower than my 3 years old i5 (4g ram + 128 ssd) Samsung Series 9 ultrabook. Besides that, it gets extremely hot. I heard that i7 machines have this problem, this is beyond worse. I am not just talking the back of the surface but also the screen, you can't even keep your hand on the screen (right side) for more than 10 seconds.

I would like to refer you even worse problem which is the fast battery drain issue. The battery level is decreased 8 percent for each 10 minutes while just watching videos on the web. It is really frustrating especially considering its price. I thought that maybe updates can solve it but nothing has changed after the updates.

I would like to ask you whether there is some obvious fix that I can do. If not, would it be possible to exchange or return it (under the warranty)?

 

[kundas1]

did you JUST buy it? if so then it has to index and stuff from the initial set up and it should settle down after a couple of days... also make sure ALL updates are done

 

[benjitek]

If you can get by without it, maybe return it and wait for the Surface Pro 4...? Should be out very soon, but could mean a couple month wait -- you may not have the luxury of time.

 

[mplatcs]

did you JUST buy it? if so then it has to index and stuff from the initial set up and it should settle down after a couple of days... also make sure ALL updates are done

Actually, I bought it from someone who bought it in November 2014. He told me that he never had such issues. He sent it to me after resetting it. I did all the windows and firmware updates, but nothing worked yet.

 

[leeshor]

The reset is what caused it to act like new. It will likely settle down as @kundas1 pointed out.

 

[mplatcs]

If you can get by without it, maybe return it and wait for the Surface Pro 4...? Should be out very soon, but could mean a couple month wait -- you may not have the luxury of time.

Actually, I was planning to do that but I thought that Surface Pro 4 will be quite expensive compared to the current Surface Pro 3 prices (yet Surface Pro 3 s are still pricy). It appears that my 3 years old samsung series 9 ultrabook works way way better than this surface. Although I love the form factor of surface, it is a quite bad machine, at least the one I have.

 

[mplatcs]

The reset is what caused it to act like new. It will likely settle down as @kundas1 pointed out.

I guess I should do that but the weird thing is that I reseted my current samsung series 9 ultrabook a week ago and installed a fresh Windows 8.1 pro. I didn't have any issues like that. Even though it is a 3 years old machine (I have been using it as my work PC), it still has 6-7 hours battery life and it works faster especially during multitasking. It is quite weird that this Surface with better/newer specs has such issues... Does Microsoft have a valid answer to that??

 

[hughlle]

Actually, I was planning to do that but I thought that Surface Pro 4 will be quite expensive compared to the current Surface Pro 3 prices (yet Surface Pro 3 s are still pricy). It appears that my 3 years old samsung series 9 ultrabook works way way better than this surface. Although I love the form factor of surface, it is a quite bad machine, at least the one I have.

I think it is likely specific to your machine. When deliberating over whether to buy an ultrabook or the surface, i spent a bit of time with my mums series 9 samsung ultrabook. The i5 surface i bought eats her ultrabook for breakfast lunch and dinner.

And just out of curiosity (in case you are unaware of this problem) do you use chrome at all? Because that is known to be a resource hog and will do nothing to help battery life.

 

[mplatcs]

I think it is likely specific to your machine. When deliberating over whether to buy an ultrabook or the surface, i spent a bit of time with my mums series 9 samsung ultrabook. The i5 surface i bought eats her ultrabook for breakfast lunch and dinner.

And just out of curiosity (in case you are unaware of this problem) do you use chrome at all? Because that is known to be a resource hog and will do nothing to help battery life.

It is not normal that Surface Pro 3 i7 is worse than a 3 years old ultrabook (of course you should also check which version, mine is late 2012 version). It has obviously better specs but the main issue I encountered with is its multitasking performance. For instance, if you are running 4-5 programs in parallel, it is almost impossible to smoothly use an additional program. This is not a problem for my samsung ultrabook, unless you exceed the memory (I have a 4gb ram). I guess it is also related to how cpu is being managed. In surface, you can see that it tries to keep cpu at lower power when you start opening multiple programs while samsung uses more cpu power while opening new programs.

The other thing where surface performs inferior is the usage of external monitor. For samsung, you get the perfect image on a full hd monitor, for surface, the image is just wrong. I tried to use different scalings etc. but didn't work even though it clearly has a better gpu.

I don't use chrome but firefox.

 

[hughlle]

It is not normal that Surface Pro 3 i7 is worse than a 3 years old ultrabook (of course you should also check which version, mine is late 2012 version). It has obviously better specs but the main issue I encountered with is its multitasking performance. For instance, if you are running 4-5 programs in parallel, it is almost impossible to smoothly use an additional program. This is not a problem for my samsung ultrabook, unless you exceed the memory (I have a 4gb ram). The other thing where surface performs inferior is the usage of external monitor. For samsung, you get the perfect image on a full hd monitor, for surface, the image is just wrong. I tried to use different scalings etc. but didn't work even though it clearly has a better gpu.

I don't use chrome but firefox.

My surface 3 works perfectly with an external monitor (scaling issues are nothing to do with the surface, that's a software thing)

What kind of programs are you using when talking about it's inability to effectively multi task?

 

[mplatcs]

My surface 3 works perfectly with an external monitor (scaling issues are nothing to do with the surface, that's a software thing)

What kind of programs are you using when talking about it's inability to effectively multi task?

For scaling, if you set it to 125% (for surface), the quality is great but the icons, text, task bar are strange. If you set it to 150%, icons, text, task bar are better sized for a full hd external monitor but image quality becomes low.

For instance: Firefox + MS Office (Excel) + Winamp + VLC player + One Metro App + Eclipse (Java) . These are quite ok for my samsung with 4gb ram.

I just also tested with Battlefield 4 (very low settings) + Firefox while checking task manager. You can see that it is not using all the resources (this shows surface is quite powerful), yet you cannot use both at the same time, Battelefield becomes unplayable and Firefox becomes very laggy. You just need to terminate one...

 

[hughlle]

For scaling, if you set it to 125% (for surface), the quality is great but the icons, text, task bar are strange. If you set it to 150%, icons, text, task bar are better sized for a full hd external monitor but image quality becomes low.

For instance: Firefox + MS Office + Winamp + VLC player + One Metro App + Eclipse (Java) . These are quite ok for my samsung with 4gb ram.

I just also tested with Battlefield 4 (very low settings) + Firefox while checking task manager. You can see that it is not using all the resources yet you cannot use both at the same time, Battelefield becomes unplayable and the responsiveness of Firefox becomes very laggy.

Scaling is a wholly different issue. The only reason you experience it on the surface and not the samsung is because the samsung has a (comparatively) rubbish screen. The scaling is not a result of something wrong with the surface, it's a result of a high DPI screen that applications have not been re-written to support properly.

As to multi tasking, this is a relatively fresh install i'm on so am just installing some stuff and will get back to you