Post Your SP3 i7 Battery Life

[GreyFox7]

What about Battery Bar Pro? Its amazing the kind of battery life you are getting on the i5. How do you do it? What programs do you have running? Any setting changes?

Oops I gave you an accidental like, but I'm not taking it back

What I ran during this time... let me try to recall:
Metro IE with tabs and tabs and tabs, Mail, Weather Channel, shopped for an eCard .. watched a number of different video/flash cards... watched some news videos on CNN, MSN, Cnet. Pasted some junk in word to edit and then posted here or elsewhere. copied the battery report into Excel to do some calculations. Oh, ran a couple battery reports. obviously made a number of posts here...
Did a lot of Googling and page views. Downloaded some files and PDFs and viewed them... watched a few YouTube videos. Adding that I saved about a dozen pictures from the web to my local picture folder then viewed them three times (they were that good) with the default picture viewer then deleted them (shoot I guess they weren't that good after all).

I only used the tablet. No external DisplayLink monitors ... (DisplayLink is a pig but I usually have power plugged in when using that.) WiFi all day nothing else connected. Display is at 40%. Auto brightness is off. Can't think of anything else I changed.

I think that's fairly representative of an average user. what did I miss?

 

[tallshorty]

I'll take the like. Lol

So basically you usually try to stay within the metro rather than desktop? I am operating 90% of the time in desktop mode and get about 6.5hrs with an average of 15% per hr battery drain according to battery report. But you are getting about 10% per hr. I should try doing everything in metro and see what I get.

What about Bluetooth? And did you attach the keyboard the entire time?

 

[GreyFox7]

I'll take the like. Lol

So basically you usually try to stay within the metro rather than desktop? I am operating 90% of the time in desktop mode and get about 6.5hrs with an average of 15% per hr battery drain according to battery report. I should try doing everything in metro and see what I get.

I like the metro browser better than desktop (I've adapted) especially when using my fingers. That would probably be true for most things... although I frequently use notepad, word, excel, and all the Windows tools which are all desktop at present. Desktop is usually open. if I need to do advanced mail ops I fire up OUTLOOK otherwise the Mail app suffices but sometimes ill use the browser to hit my mail that might depend on what I'm doing and where ... if on the desktop ill use desktop IE.

I don't have Firefox or Chrome installed on my SP3, haven't needed either of those in months... IE just works.

Edit: I don't use Bluetooth so its turned off.
I don't know about battery bar but its redundant no? it probably doesn't amount to a hill of beans... but... a dozen hills of beans add up.

In task Manger there are NO startup apps listed... yet.

 

[markusbeutel]

Need a 2-3 hour option... While I love the Pro 3 so far, battery life is TERRIBLE. If I crank my display down to 30-40%, I can get close to 4 hours, max. This is solely based on using Metro IE (with multiple tabs open). Have monitored what's running and what %'s are being taken up - nothing significant in there. Haven't really even installed anything yet either as I just got it 2 days ago. Overall, It's probably 10-15% more efficient battery-wise compared to my 8-year old MacBook

With the display at 100%, I've yet to hit 2 hours before it's completely drained. Has there been any word on a power cover? Because I'll be throwing my money at something like that.

I should note that I pretty much have been using Desktop over Metro - so maybe I need to convert if there's battery improvement to be had going that route... Just really hate the lack of customizability with Metro. Even uniform tile colors would be welcomed...

 

[Josh359]

I usually get around 7 hours of battery life with the brightness set low. Just wanted y'all to know that when I went outside to use it, connected to my mobile LTE hotspot, at full brightness, it is projected to last just over 3 hours (expected, just did not know what the number or discharge rate would be).

 

[mtalinm]

I had to go with the 3-4 hours optionin the poll, given that it discharges 5-10% per hour in "sleep" mode (even with keyboard-wake disabled)

 

[mtalinm]

I just did a pretty well controlled test. Mostly working on a Word document, playing music in the background with occasional web browing (wifi on always) and the PDF Reader app open (outlook too).

Started at 9am, took a 30m break during which time the i7 slept but didn't appear to lose any battery). it is 2:25 and ... it just shut down.

So that's just shy of 5 hours. bummer. I used to get 8 hours on my SP2, albeit in Power Saver mode with CPU throttled to 50%. Sure wish I could activate Power Saver mode here...don't care about Connected Standby anyway...

Anyone hear of a similar test with i5? if it gets 1-2 hours more I will swap this one.

 

[Moonsurface]

I looked at my battery report last night, since OS install the average is 5.06 hours, however the first few days of use it got 3-5 hours as it was downloading heavy updates etc, I also ran my extensive test on it all on battery power so I expected a few days of lower time.

However the later reports are showing 6-7 hours and even one day over 9 hours of battery life. So I'm pretty happy as other than reducing the display brightness to about 40% which is perfectly usable I have done NO other tweaking in an attempt to improve battery, I don't generally switch wifi off, I haven't touched indexing options or anything else. So for the moment I've put 5-6 hours on the poll but it may be slightly better than that once my general use evens out fewer days it's much lower due to high impact usage.

At the moment I have my SP3 in my bag under my desk at work, it was charged three days ago, I've used it briefly for maybe 1 hour each day and just shut the cover and let it do it's own thing. When I looked at it yesterday it still had over 75% battery life so I guess connected standby isn't eating it too much.

 

[Sassi]

4-5 hours mostly doing mainly web browsing, OneNote stuff, YouTube so not brilliant but it could be worse I guess.

 

[Andre Pallett]

Wow, I wish my i7 SP3 worked like this. I'll be returning it for a refund as the battery life on my unit is utterly woeful. I would be struggling to get 2hrs. I've only had it 5 days, took it away with work for a 3 day trip, didn't take the charger as I figured I'd only being using it lightly. Didn't use it much at all as it was dead within a day! Fully charged it on my return yesterday, light useage last evening and turned it on this morning to the 10% warning - I must have used it a maximum of 45 minutes on it's last charge.

I've charged it 4 times and I would say I'm averaging under 1 hr use before getting a 10% warning.
It's fully updated, so I called MS Support today and the guy I spoke too was aware of an issue and advised me they were going to issue another patch if I could hang on for it....otherwise advised to buy a Macbook.

 

[Moonsurface]

Wow, I wish my i7 SP3 worked like this. I'll be returning it for a refund as the battery life on my unit is utterly woeful. I would be struggling to get 2hrs. I've only had it 5 days, took it away with work for a 3 day trip, didn't take the charger as I figured I'd only being using it lightly. Didn't use it much at all as it was dead within a day! Fully charged it on my return yesterday, light useage last evening and turned it on this morning to the 10% warning - I must have used it a maximum of 45 minutes on it's last charge.

I've charged it 4 times and I would say I'm averaging under 1 hr use before getting a 10% warning.
It's fully updated, so I called MS Support today and the guy I spoke too was aware of an issue and advised me they were going to issue another patch if I could hang on for it....otherwise advised to buy a Macbook.

Definitely not normal!!! Even importing photos and with fan on full blast and processor at 100% for 45 minutes mine only drained 37%. It went on to last 3.5 hours even after that challenging episode

Something is up with yours. If you look at the task manager does it show anything using the processor a lot while you're just generally browsing?

Does it get to 100% on a charge? Maybe you have a faulty battery or charger or something- don't give up on the SP3 though it's a superb device when it's working right. Luckily I've had no issues with mine really at all. I haven't had to tweak it or anything so far... fingers crossed, touch wood etc.