I use mine at uni and at home, quite happily hit 7 hours. On the SP3 with Windows 8.1 I was hitting 9 without an issue. Never gotten 9 hours with win 10 though, and certainly not 7 while spending am evening browsing.
MS website claims up to 9 hours of video?
- Thread starter gman713
- Start date
I use mine at uni and at home, quite happily hit 7 hours. On the SP3 with Windows 8.1 I was hitting 9 without an issue. Never gotten 9 hours with win 10 though, and certainly not 7 while spending am evening browsing.
JobsiteFish
Member
I can't even hit the 5 hour mark doing basic tasks. 9 hours does not seem feasible.
TonyJackson
New Member
hi，I have no experience with SP3. However it also heavily relies on what kind of jobs. I tried surface 3 and it surprised me with light weight jobs (almost the same as official test). But it's not the case of SP4. To be honest, most will agree that apple's battery test matches better with real situations.
You're not alone. That's pretty close to the average I see reported.
Maybe not, but think of it this way. Clearly MS has a lot of work to do improving/optimizing both Windows 10 and the SP4 to minimize battery drain. For example, the sleep drain and keyboard drain issues. I have a high degree of confidence that these issues will be solved.
Is it not realistic to at least hope that they will also find ways to improve battery life? Perhaps not all the way to 9 hours, but certainly more than the 5 hours or so we're all getting now.
As I said before, MS has a lot riding on making these improvements. We're talking $billions here.
I was having too much drain using VLC when using an external power source (external batt with 12v output) after I hit 6% on my battery during a flight. The movie would not play for more than ~30 seconds before the SP4 would shut down. When I checked the CPU it was running at ~15% usage, but at 2.8-2.9GHz! I changed the power profile to limit the CPU to 40% and the CPU dropped to 1GHz, 50% usage, and the power consumption dropped by 30%. It was enough that the external battery power kept it running (and charged the SP4 a bit).
MS is just plain incompetent when it comes to power optimization. It's basically spiking the CPU to full turbo (and spiking the voltge and therefore power consumption) every time an app uses more than x cycles of CPU. Instead of looking at the filtered CPU usage and optimizing the speed, it's setting the C state based on a very short time frame which results in a bunch of idle time at full throttle. It's no wonder Apple can get an extra 30%-50% of life out of their batteries using the same processor - they're probably using a much better filtering algorithm.
Zkyevolved
Active Member
I thought I'd throw my opinion in here. I have had a few SP4s, and a SP2. I have to say, 5-6 hours of mixed usage is about my normal battery life with CPU limited to 100%. Then, when I limited to 50% (for word, video, browsing the web in 4-5 tabs, youtube, you know, simple stuff) I get 8-9 hours of mixed usage. So, all in all, I'm pretty happy. I just look at this ultra thin ultra powerful device. I can't compare this to a laptop because a laptop is thicker and has more room. But it is laptop internals incarnated in a tablet body! So... Even if it were limited to 5 hours, I think 5 hours for this form factor is good! But luckily, with minimal tweaking (literally, all I did was max CPU 50% for a new power profile) and I get 8-9 hours of mixed usage (like I mentioned above).
Hopefully MS can tweak their own profiles and limit the CPU for simple stuff, and max it out when it gets to more demanding stuff!
Hopefully MS can tweak their own profiles and limit the CPU for simple stuff, and max it out when it gets to more demanding stuff!
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