Post Your SP3 Power/Battery/Charging Issues Here

[OGF]

So I woke up and my battery went from 70 something percent to dead. I tested it again in sleep mode while i went to the gym ( 3 hours ) and it only drained 3 percent. Just curious if i did something wrong. Also can you guys tell me how much your surface uses during sleep in some hours. I have a i5 256 btw.

 

[solidsnakejv]

Hi guys, just join the forum for this reason. Two days ago I was using my SP3 showing full battery and it shut off. when I went to turn it back on it showed the dead batter icon and I plugged it.

Yesterday my wife was using it for about 3.5 hours, and today me for about an hour and the battery still show at 99%. I have here are the battery logs from two days ago and yesterday/today.

Any ideas?

 

[OGF]

Fixed my problems, It was always the Marvell Avastar Wireless-AC. I didn't need to do a hardreset like some people did. I just installed the older versions then reinstalled the newest one again and fixed the issue. for now that is.

 

[Danielo290881]

Hi together,
when my SP3 is in connected standby without attached anything, i always have following in the sleepstudy report. I have tried forum and google, but cant find anything. Would be glad hor help what that could be.

 

[Danielo290881]

Hi together,
when my SP3 is in connected standby without attached anything, i always have following in the sleepstudy report. I have tried forum and google, but cant find anything. Would be glad hor help what that could be.

Okay, i have turnod off the setting for 3 USB Devices that they can turn on the system from hybernate. After that i did a restart and went into connected standby. Now everything is green. Will check out what it could be.

 

[Zog1971]

Ok, I just did a test on my i7, 256gb. I only had Netflix and one other webpage open. My screen brightness was on 40% (which I actually would like to be more around 60% but dimmed to 40% in hopes of better results). I am only using the Firefox browser and had task manager up to monitor. I let it stream consecutive episodes of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia in an attempt to see how much battery life I could get. I only got about 2:45 until it went down to 5% and turned off. That's not acceptable, right? In monitoring task manager no other processes of note ran and the CPU usage was staying around 10-18% (usually hovering around 10%) and the processor was running between .9-1.5ghz. The unit got warmish but the fan never came on even on low to my knowledge. I don't have live tiles going, I have notifications turned off and removed unnecessary indexing folders. I've read through the threads about battery life but I'm stumped and, quite honestly, discouraged. I realize video streaming is somewhat of a battery drain, but 2:45??? Please help.

 

[Zog1971]

Follow up to last post ... I ran the TabletMark v2 battery test and it ended after 4 iterations in 3 hours with 75% battery remaining. looks like I need to run the conditioning option first or read the instructions anyway I checked it hourly and after 1 hour it was at 92%, 2 hours at 84% and 75% after three hours. a fairly consistent usage and at that rate it would have 25% left after 9 hours. this test is not super hard more like a typical user.

In Addition today I ran 9 hours on battery during almost constant usage. The battery declined fairly consistently at about 10% per hour with 8% left after 9 hours. I had to go out so I plugged it in and an hour later it was charged to 54% when I started using it again while charging and after 1.5 hours total charge time its up to 75%.

I have to go out again so it'll be full charged when I get back and ill see what else I can do with TabletMark.

Can you please keep us updated on this program? I downloaded it, but I'm a little confused about exactly what to run, what to run first. I just found some instructions online so am going to look those over, but will anxious to hear more about your results.

 

[Zog1971]

So, I ran the battery_report.html and it is estimating my battery life on my SP3 to be at 4:30 hours. I ran the same report on my SP1 and got 4:01 hours. This isn't good, my friends. Considering the SP1 generally was considered to have very poor battery life I should be getting WAY better results than this and obviously a FAR cry from the advertised battery life. Any suggestions before I return my i7? Restoring? I'm frustrated.

 

[GreyFox7]

Can you please keep us updated on this program? I downloaded it, but I'm a little confused about exactly what to run, what to run first. I just found some instructions online so am going to look those over, but will anxious to hear more about your results.

TabletMark is useful in that you can install it launch the program, click the battery test and it will (should) run until the battery dies. Then when you relaunch it after a charge it will detect it was in a battery run and report the results. That is also useful for making a comparison later to your prior run or to a like system to determine if a system has a different than baseline battery life. Example if user A and B report 4 hours and 8 hours battery life but TabletMark reports 10 hours for both the difference is usage profile with "all other things" being equal. I think TabletMark is a bit on the weak side as far as usage goes so times will be a bit longer than maybe the average user would experience. Its useful with the right perspective but it may also confuse and frustrate people unfamiliar with these tools.

As the great Greek Testing and Benchmarking philosopher Perfomaximus once said "Testing proves that testing works".

As you are finding out sometimes we have processes running amuck and those will impact battery life significantly. These rogue processes will also skew your battery reports same as if your baseball player was in a batting slump. From the example above, "ALL other things", may not be equal. In the real world, with users being different, this has always been the case. However, when we have Rogue Processes exacerbating the situation it makes questioning everything even more critical and comparisons that much more difficult. I had not experienced these rogue processes until the last few days, hopefully they are not common but they must be considered when users report incidents.

Lastly your usage profile, sans the rogue processes, is the ultimate determinate factor of your battery life. If you run x days with out rogue processes, look at the run time for those days as an indicator of where your usage profile falls. over time your true average will emerge. powercfg /energy will give you an rundown of what used "energy" as this report can be run even if you were plugged in. Then you have to decide is there anything I can do to affect these results?

One user here was quite vocal and adamant about NOT doing anything that would help his battery life; if anything he did just the opposite. Data tells us things, what we chose to do with that information is a completely different matter. There are manipulators all around us in this world with all sorts of agendas you have to deal with. Can you believe what you see, read, hear? is it real? what is real? What you see is real for you but may not be the true picture. Keep digging, the scientific process does not know politics or brands and if it does its corrupt.

Long winded way of saying your mileage may vary.

 

[Zog1971]

TabletMark is useful in that you can install it launch the program, click the battery test and it will (should) run until the battery dies. Then when you relaunch it after a charge it will detect it was in a battery run and report the results. That is also useful for making a comparison later to your prior run or to a like system to determine if a system has a different than baseline battery life. Example if user A and B report 4 hours and 8 hours battery life but TabletMark reports 10 hours for both the difference is usage profile with "all other things" being equal. I think TabletMark is a bit on the weak side as far as usage goes so times will be a bit longer than maybe the average user would experience. Its useful with the right perspective but it may also confuse and frustrate people unfamiliar with these tools.

As the great Greek Testing and Benchmarking philosopher Perfomaximus once said "Testing proves that testing works".

As you are finding out sometimes we have processes running amuck and those will impact battery life significantly. These rogue processes will also skew your battery reports same as if your baseball player was in a batting slump. From the example above, "ALL other things", may not be equal. In the real world, with users being different, this has always been the case. However, when we have Rogue Processes exacerbating the situation it makes questioning everything even more critical and comparisons that much more difficult. I had not experienced these rogue processes until the last few days, hopefully they are not common but they must be considered when users report incidents.

Lastly your usage profile, sans the rogue processes, is the ultimate determinate factor of your battery life. If you run x days with out rogue processes, look at the run time for those days as an indicator of where your usage profile falls. over time your true average will emerge. powercfg /energy will give you an rundown of what used "energy" as this report can be run even if you were plugged in. Then you have to decide is there anything I can do to affect these results?

One user here was quite vocal and adamant about NOT doing anything that would help his battery life; if anything he did just the opposite. Data tells us things, what we chose to do with that information is a completely different matter. There are manipulators all around us in this world with all sorts of agendas you have to deal with. Can you believe what you see, read, hear? is it real? what is real? What you see is real for you but may not be the true picture. Keep digging, the scientific process does not know politics or brands and if it does its corrupt.

Long winded way of saying your mileage may vary.

Great points, all. Yes, I need to give it some time since I have fixed some things I know where draining it. However, those things had all been fixed when I streamed Netflix yesterday for only 2:45 of battery life and my SP1 then did the same and lasted 2:20. The SP3 should be better than that. I would be fine with more around 7 hours as I just need something that will last me all day at school without the worries of plugging in or something that will last on long plane flights when I travel.

I did actually run the battery test with the TabletMark in full last. Thanks again for this suggestion. I let it run all night to depletion of the battery. The instruction suggested downloading and running a script to stop system process that normally run from running during the test. That freaked me out a little so didn't do it. So, any system processes that normally run during the course of the night also ran during this test. I left bluetooth on as I will be leaving it on in real life and the screen was at 45% which is as low as I feel acceptable for my viewing needs. I let it run all 3 tests (email & web, photo video sharing, video playback) over and over and it ran for 7:10. This is encouraging, although as you pointed out I am wondering if this is on the "light" side of what we will do. I do like the fact that it was doing tasks solid for the full run as I do know that my usage will be more sporadic for sure. I'm also realize as I'm reading this back that there are concessions I can make at times when I REALLY need more battery (like turning off bluetooth and lowering screen to 35%). Maybe I'll run the battery test tonight at those levels to see what difference it makes.

Is the 2:45 minutes of netflix streaming just something that I should expect? It sure didn't look like it was taxing the cpu enough when monitoring the processes. Am I wanting more out of an i7 than I should or is this not even coming close to what the battery should deliver? I know enough tech to be inquisitive but not enough to answer my questions. All advice is always appreciated.

 

[Chris Hoang]

Hi, I just got the SP3 for a few days and the battery life is terrible. The battery drops significantly when streaming videos and play games. According to the battery log - it drops 43% in less than an hour.
Is this normal? Should I request an exchange for a new unit?
. I also experienced overheating issues (auto shutdown) before the firmware update on 16/08.

Battery-log
16:39:04 Active Battery 100 % 43,958 mWh
17:50:00 Report generated Battery 57 % 25,270 mWh

 

[ZorMi]

The top power consumption I noticed was 19-20W during some background update tasks. Usually, it is in 4-6W range while working with documents, mail, surfing...

So, it could be possible to spend half the battery in one hour, theoretically...