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Known issues for SP4

@BorisHristov - It might help if you generate battery and sleep study report and share your results. You can look at those numbers and see at what times the drains occur and correlate that with what you might have been doing. Some have seen that they actually lose charge while in Hibernate, which would not be good. Throw the following two commands into a .bat file, save on the desktop, and then right click/run as admin. It will generate two html files.

powercfg /batteryreport /output "C:\Users\*boris*\Desktop\battery.html" /duration 7
powercfg /sleepstudy /output "C:\Users\*boris*\Desktop\sleep.html" /duration 7

Note: Max duration can be 14 days.

I have nothing turned off in terms of background notifications, etc. Wi-Fi is on during sleep. Why? Because if you turn all that off then you might as well turn off connected standby and use hibernate. Or even better, disable hibernate, safe disk space and just shutdown :)

Anyway, my battery drain during sleep is about 1.5 % per hour, but I had to use an older display driver to achieve that. Using the latest or beta, and I'm back at the 4% that Zkyevolved sees (and as well as many others from different forums/sites). One guy on answers.microsoft claims that MS is aware of the issue and is working on it. I hope so.

I'm getting about 5 to 6 hours of active use before having to charge. The battery life estimates from the battery report show something similar. Keep in mind that those are estimates. The 5 to 6 is for average everyday stuff (browsing, Office 365, etc). Video conferencing with Skype Video will chew up battery much faster. You can get an idea of how much power an app might use by running a battery report, noting the time, then running the application, and then generating another battery report when done. The built in Skype app consumes a lot of power, but the people on the other end tell me the video quality is spectacular. So perhaps that app is worth it ...

One other thing that I did was to cap the max CPU while on battery, by setting it to 95%. This keeps the CPU from jumping into turbo all the time and maxes at 2.3 GHz (i5 model here). However, not sure if that helps to save any significant amount of power while using the battery and just may revert it back to the default setting. I really won't know for a couple more days of use and checking the numbers in the reports.

The 9 hours claimed by Microsoft is just a marketing gimmick. The scenario (as defined by the fine print *) doesn't represent and realistic use case scenario. You're not going to setup a video to loop and stare at your screen for 9 hours. It's unfortunate that people don't read the fine print there. Many buy the device thinking they are going to get 9 hours of general everyday use - you won't. As for those here claiming battery life LONGER than 9 hours, well, I have very hard time believing them. Perhaps they could share some battery report data to support those claims, or give me money and I'll believe anything they have to say. Until then, I'll just ignore them.
 

hughlle

Super Moderator
Staff member
Really mature attitude.... what possible reason would we have for lying? From day one i have been completely willing to point out every flaw i find with the surface products i receive. Battery life has never been one of them (other than in the early days of windows 10). My s3, sp3, and sp4 happily give me 9 hours or more of use. You stated yourself, it's about the usage scenario. Mine is microsoft word, onenote, and occasionally the internet. It works just great for me. If it didn't i wouldn't have bought the things, as i've no option for recharging when at uni (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/RNCpano.jpg - that is my university, with the Queens house in the background, not much they can do in those buildings in the way of putting in plug sockets at every desk etc)
 

Zkyevolved

Active Member
@BorisHristov - It might help if you generate battery and sleep study report and share your results. You can look at those numbers and see at what times the drains occur and correlate that with what you might have been doing. Some have seen that they actually lose charge while in Hibernate, which would not be good. Throw the following two commands into a .bat file, save on the desktop, and then right click/run as admin. It will generate two html files.

powercfg /batteryreport /output "C:\Users\*boris*\Desktop\battery.html" /duration 7
powercfg /sleepstudy /output "C:\Users\*boris*\Desktop\sleep.html" /duration 7

Note: Max duration can be 14 days.

I have nothing turned off in terms of background notifications, etc. Wi-Fi is on during sleep. Why? Because if you turn all that off then you might as well turn off connected standby and use hibernate. Or even better, disable hibernate, safe disk space and just shutdown :)

Anyway, my battery drain during sleep is about 1.5 % per hour, but I had to use an older display driver to achieve that. Using the latest or beta, and I'm back at the 4% that Zkyevolved sees (and as well as many others from different forums/sites). One guy on answers.microsoft claims that MS is aware of the issue and is working on it. I hope so.

I'm getting about 5 to 6 hours of active use before having to charge. The battery life estimates from the battery report show something similar. Keep in mind that those are estimates. The 5 to 6 is for average everyday stuff (browsing, Office 365, etc). Video conferencing with Skype Video will chew up battery much faster. You can get an idea of how much power an app might use by running a battery report, noting the time, then running the application, and then generating another battery report when done. The built in Skype app consumes a lot of power, but the people on the other end tell me the video quality is spectacular. So perhaps that app is worth it ...

One other thing that I did was to cap the max CPU while on battery, by setting it to 95%. This keeps the CPU from jumping into turbo all the time and maxes at 2.3 GHz (i5 model here). However, not sure if that helps to save any significant amount of power while using the battery and just may revert it back to the default setting. I really won't know for a couple more days of use and checking the numbers in the reports.

The 9 hours claimed by Microsoft is just a marketing gimmick. The scenario (as defined by the fine print *) doesn't represent and realistic use case scenario. You're not going to setup a video to loop and stare at your screen for 9 hours. It's unfortunate that people don't read the fine print there. Many buy the device thinking they are going to get 9 hours of general everyday use - you won't. As for those here claiming battery life LONGER than 9 hours, well, I have very hard time believing them. Perhaps they could share some battery report data to support those claims, or give me money and I'll believe anything they have to say. Until then, I'll just ignore them.
by any chance is the driver the September driver??
 
Really mature attitude.... what possible reason would we have for lying? From day one i have been completely willing to point out every flaw i find with the surface products i receive. Battery life has never been one of them (other than in the early days of windows 10). My s3, sp3, and sp4 happily give me 9 hours or more of use. You stated yourself, it's about the usage scenario. Mine is microsoft word, onenote, and occasionally the internet. It works just great for me. If it didn't i wouldn't have bought the things, as i've no option for recharging when at uni (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/RNCpano.jpg - that is my university, with the Queens house in the background, not much they can do in those buildings in the way of putting in plug sockets at every desk etc)

I don't believe anyone. Call it a character defect. All I'm asking is that you generate a battery report and post a screenshot of the numbers.

Nice picture ...
 

raqball

Active Member
My M3 has been almost flawless so far (knock on wood).. I just recently got it though and it updated to all the latest updates right out of the box.

I did update the host file and I use Chrome. I also disabled Cortana completely as its not a feature I am interested in.

I guess I have been lucky with my unit so far as if I had all the issues I see others posting about I probably would have returned it..
 

robk

New Member
My new sp4 has the following issues (although have all updated to the newest version till 27 Nov):
1st: Wifi disconnected and kept asking password with a warning: your information changed since the previous connection;
2nd: flickering screen especially in low brightness setting;
3rd: display adapter crashes randomly;
4th: cannot wake up from opening type cover;
5th: screen died randomly and have to do a switch off-on operation.

Any other issues you suffered pls posted below and we could try to find solutions. :)

I too am experiencing issues with the display adapter randomly crashing and not being able to wake after opening the type cover. I basically had enough and requested Microsoft ship me a replacement which they did. Same issues are still present on the replacement model, however; much more infrequently which leads me to think there was an issue with update 1511 build 15086 which I had installed before Microsoft pulled it. Having weird issues with Edge too. Very disappointed in this product and until they fix them I can't see replacing my laptop/iPad for a Surface Pro.
 

EMINENT

Active Member
I've actually been really surprised since the last update. No freezes. No display driver crashes, decent battery life. Only thing bugging me is the occasional black screen at the Hello login when coming from sleep and I don't see my picture backgrounds.
 
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theprophe

New Member
Where is the link for the old display driver? Trying anything to get more the 5 and a half hours of mainly just browsing with mostly 0% brightness
 
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