Known issues for SP4

[TonyJackson]

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.

 

[leeshor]

Welcome to the forum

No such issues with mine.

#1 That's a strange one. Have you tried that anywhere other than your home network?

#2 That has been reported by quite a few other people but there hasn't been a cause pined down that I am aware of. I suspect it will be corrected with an update though I don't have that problem. I feel it's related to another one of the problems. probably a driver and the way your Surface is being used..

#3 That has pretty much been pinned down to an issue with Edge and can sometimes be lessened or corrected by using a host file filter or using a different browser. It may also be related to #2 since I'm not seeing it and don't use Edge.

#4 Not sure about that. Does it happen if you open it within a few minutes or does it take longer?

#5 Need more information.

 

[robertcan]

Welcome!

1. Have not experienced any issues with Wi-Fi.
2. Have not experienced any issue with screen flicker.
3. Yep, this one is still an issue I experience and it isn't browser specific on my machine. With all the updates, it's become less of a problem but not completely resolved yet.
4. Yes, I've had this one but unable to reproduce the issue at will. Only happened a few times.

You didn't mention the issue some of us are seeing with battery life. I'm only getting 5-6 hours of casual web surfing, email, Office 365 use. MS advertises "Up to 9hrs" and I'm just not getting anything close to that. In the end, it's not a deal breaker for me as I don't rely on battery power very much.

Sorry I don't have any suggestions for resolving any of the issues you've mentioned. I suspect some of these will be resolved with subsequent updates. FWIW, my experience since launch day is improving which gives me reason to believe MS will get eventually resolve the issues related to sw.

 

[GatsbyGlen]

The fine print for the 9 hours indicates it is for a non realistic use case scenario. Are you going to setup a video loop and walk away? I think most people get 5 to 6. One should look at their battery reports. My recent browsing session (Chrome) of 1:37 minutes chewed up 26% of the battery, at 30% brightness. So about 6 hours max, but that's just web surfing. Skype video chews it up much faster.

Here are some recent numbers, based on the battery report's "Battery Life Estimates"

At Full Charge (Active)
11/23 - 5:56:21
11/24 - 6:19:11
11/25 - 5:18:27 (was doing some CPU benchmarking on battery this day)
11/26 - 7:52:33 (I made a change here to cap the max CPU to 95% while on battery, to keep it from going into Turbo).

I'll see today if the power change produces similar results while on battery.

 

[leeshor]

For whatever reason, (and it's surprising due to my old/poor/bad eyes), I have managed to be very confortable with autobright off and a setting of between 35% and 40%. My runtime is a low of 6 hours and a high of 11 which I have reached several times.

 

[GatsbyGlen]

For whatever reason, (and it's surprising due to my old/poor/bad eyes), I have managed to be very confortable with autobright off and a setting of between 35% and 40%. My runtime is a low of 6 hours and a high of 11 which I have reached several times.

I'd like to see your battery report for the past 14 days

powercfg /batteryreport /output "C:\anywhere\battery.html" /duration 14

 

[BorisHristov]

By the way, can someone point to something like "Best practices" for extending the battery life of the Surface Pro 4. My view is that there is something wrong with this device's batter. I cannot get more than 4 - 4h and a half.

I remember reading that if you were using Windows Hello that was kind of a problem?
The first few times I saw the Edge browser taking just a ton of battery and so I migrated to Chrome. Now the display is the biggest consumer. The driver of my battery says it's from November 2015(all updates installed), so I seriously don't know what else I can do.

Yesterday I left it on Sleep with 1h and 10 minutes left and in the morning, trying to use it - no battery at all!? Is Hibernate (noticed this somewhere) the better choice in this case?

Anyone with some suggestions?

 

[leeshor]

By the way, can someone point to something like "Best practices" for extending the battery life of the Surface Pro 4. My view is that there is something wrong with this device's batter. I cannot get more than 4 - 4h and a half.

I remember reading that if you were using Windows Hello that was kind of a problem?
The first few times I saw the Edge browser taking just a ton of battery and so I migrated to Chrome. Now the display is the biggest consumer. The driver of my battery says it's from November 2015(all updates installed), so I seriously don't know what else I can do.

Yesterday I left it on Sleep with 1h and 10 minutes left and in the morning, trying to use it - no battery at all!? Is Hibernate (noticed this somewhere) the better choice in this case?

Anyone with some suggestions?

There are a ton of variables. We do have a master power thread. Surface Pro 3 Power Management Sticky | Microsoft Surface Forums and another one that may help, here Surface Pro Q&A Power and more. | Microsoft Surface Forums

Here are some hints that may help. IMAP mail can soak up battery, live tiles certainly use battery, a weak WiFi makes the system struggle, lots of media being synced to the cloud eats battery, over use of a slow microSD card hurts, autobright settings are a battery drain and others. It boils down to user preference or necessity on most of these things. You can only stretch it so far.

You would/could extend your battery a lot by uninstalling Chrome. Because it has a background process running, simply not using it doesn't give you back 100% of what you lost. Use IE or Firefox.

 

[hughlle]

For whatever reason, (and it's surprising due to my old/poor/bad eyes), I have managed to be very confortable with autobright off and a setting of between 35% and 40%. My runtime is a low of 6 hours and a high of 11 which I have reached several times.

I took mine to uni on thursday for 9 hours. Absolutely stella performance battery-wise (i also use a lower brightness than most) and have not done anything like turning off cortana etc. Also using chrome. Very impressed

 

[BorisHristov]

Ok. Got it. Will take a look at some of those again. Earlier today iI changed to hibernate and now the battery is almost not drained at all when the machine is not used. Not the case by any means with sleep mode which strangey is the default option.

 

[Zkyevolved]

I am having massive sleep drain (between 4-5% per hour). I know hibernate is an option, but it really isn't! Hibernate is taking all the content from RAM into the SSD and then completely turning off. Sometimes I just want to close the lid, throw it in my bag and open it back up 15 minutes later. It seems like a lot of hibernation if you do that a few times a day.

Then, today I spoke with Surface for the second time. The first time they said that it is a known issue and they took control of my SP4. For other reasons, I got a second Sp4 and I saw that I had the same issue. This must be either software or hardware related out of the box (seeing as I did the test without ANY of my installed apps, just MS stuff and updated out of the box).

This second chat with Surface made me worry a bit more.

Before this I was told that (copied and pasted from transcript) "Alright well to be perfectly honest with you, that kind of battery drain is pretty standard for standby as the device is still active. You could adjust it to go into hibernation a bit quicker. But to be honest that is normal for any laptop on sleep now days. "

My response:
"Kent: It's not, actually
Kent: I have a surface pro 2 and a surface pro 3
Kent: None of which have the same drain
Kent: I can leave them for DAYS in standby and not lose what I'm losing on my SP4.
Kent: Is this going to be fixed?."

And here's a snipping that made me mad ....

Do you guys think this will be fixed? Or are they going to play with us for a long time! I love my Sp4, I really do. Many issues can be tolerated, but the standby drain is a big issue for me...

 

[BorisHristov]

That's interesting from them. Hope we will see a fix indeed because otherwise i cannot also tolerate that drain and will remain in hibernate.