March update brings new WiFi driver

[eee]

So I just installed the March update and noticed that my Wifi driver now ends in .168 instead of .150 as previously. I've been having pretty shitty battery life, about 4-4,5 hrs (Surface Pro 2, yes) with bluetooth on and have been suspecting the WiFi adapter to be the culprit. It's been like I never got that October update.

I noticed the settings on the Balanced plan had been reset to "maximum performance" on battery and I changed it to maximum battery life again. Let's see if there's any difference now.

 

[Dim-Ize]

Crossing fingers too.

 

[eee]

You've been having poor battery life too? When did you buy your SP2? This is not a controlled experiment but I've noticed that many of those that have reported 6-7 hours of battery life bought it quite early, while I got mine in late December, hence why I believe I may have never gotten the improved WiFi driver because of the December update debacle.

Also, I just noticed that there's a new Intel graphics control panel now. There's two battery saving options in there that I adjusted and it may be giving lower power draw at idle, but it's too early to say right now.

 

[grumpy]

I've been having pretty shitty battery life, about 4-4,5 hrs (Surface Pro 2, yes) with bluetooth on and have been suspecting the WiFi adapter to be the culprit. It's been like I never got that October update.

Have you checked the task manager to make sure that there is not abnormally high CPU utilization?

 

[Rvacha]

I see no changes in WiFi speed and my SP2 still crashes. Maybe they'll fix it next month, or next year, or something...

 

[GoodBytes]

It should not crash. You are the first I read about this problem.

 

[wditters]

I see no changes in WiFi speed and my SP2 still crashes. Maybe they'll fix it next month, or next year, or something...

Interesting. In my case the SP2 is very stable, and WiFi is 2-5% faster ...

 

[Rvacha]

The key word is STILL crashes. I've had a crash issue since day one which got worse this year. I was hoping one of the driver updates today would fix it although my gut says it is likely a firmware/UEFI problem

 

[GoodBytes]

I think you have a hardware problem.
The majority of times constant BSODs (not a once in a blue moon type of thing, that could simply be a driver bug, where Windows could not recover from it by restarting it) or crashes are hardware problems

 

[Rvacha]

You may be correct, I certainly can't rule that out. My problem has been what some people call the "black screen of death". It happens when the SP2 attempts to transition from sleep to hibernate. It appears to be cumulative, meaning that it won't normally start crashing until 3 hrs or so since the last crash. It varies, but that's roughly the norm. It doesn't matter if it was awake the entire time, if it has been asleep the entire time, or some combo. I can disable hibernate and it will run and sleep for days on end - I've never seen it crash. I can manually enter hibernate without issues most of the time

That was until today after today's updates. Now I can crash it 20% of the time simply by hitting the power button (to sleep it) then hitting it again in 1-2 seconds to wake it *IF* I have "Turn on fast startup" enabled. If I disable this feature it is much harder to crash with the 1-2 second re-awake scenario

To me these data points suggest a firmware or software timing issue, and not a hardware issue. I am out of warranty but plan to see about getting a replacement after I get my new PC. Don't know how lucky I'll be but we'll see. Right now my goal is get either my SP2 or a replacement stable enough that I can sell it in good conscience and recover some of my costs. After that I'm done with MS PCs

 

[GoodBytes]

I don't know dude. Never had any problem.
And how can you be out of warranty? It's not even been a 1 year since the Surface Pro 2 was out.

 

[Rvacha]

Perhaps my ignorance is showing but is the warranty one year? Never bothered to check