SB2 15" battery life

[jnjroach]

I'm a little sad at the battery life claims. I can't quite tell if it's usage habits, faulty units, chrome or what is causing the disparate results from person to person. I'm sure that 7 hours worst case will be fine but man, I'd love to not have to worry about charging from when I get up to when I go to bed like advertised.

17 Hours is a Video Playback loop -

They are very specific -

"1 Surface Book 2 battery life

Surface Book 2 13.5”: Up to 17 hours of video playback. Testing conducted by Microsoft in October 2017 using preproduction Intel® Core™ i5, 256GB, 8 GB RAM device. Testing consisted of full battery discharge during video playback. All settings were default except: Wi-Fi was associated with a network and Auto-Brightness disabled. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage and other factors.

Surface Book 2 15”: Up to 17 hours of video playback. Testing conducted by Microsoft in October 2017 using preproduction Intel® Core™ i7, 512GB, 16 GB RAM dGPU device. Testing consisted of full battery discharge during video playback. All settings were default except: Wi-Fi was associated with a network and Auto-Brightness disabled. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage and other factors."

Many applications can kill battery life - Chrome is infamous for it, as is Slack and of course gaming, CAD, Photo or Video Editing, aggressive security software and running legacy software (especially old Win32 Applications)

 

[wynand32]

The challenge with measuring battery life, especially across users, is that there's so little consistency in how we use machines. My own concern isn't whether I get the same battery life as someone else but rather if my machine is getting the battery life it should get based on my usage. In other words, that it's not defective somehow (a serious concern with a machine that cost me over $3400 including taxes and Complete and minus my 10% military discount).

I'm guessing that those who are getting 14+ hours of battery life or whatever aren't actually hammering at the machine for hours straight. There's time spent away from the machine, the machine is put to sleep on occasion, and etc. Also, it's easy to point at Chrome and Slack, et. al., as problems, but if you need to use them then their impact needs to be factored in.

My own "7-8 hours" estimate is based on my literally working on the machine for that amount of time -- at most, I might take a 5-minute bathroom break occasionally (yes, that work habit is hell on my body). And that estimate also wasn't based on the machine being in battery saver mode nor limiting what apps I'm using to stretch battery life further. I'm sure if I tried I could stretch to the same kind of usage, but I'm naturally more concerned about how the machine holds up with my own usage patterns.

 

[jnjroach]

Naturally. We all use computers different not to mention that we all multitask like crazy. Flash adds running in the background of 10 open chrome windows while downloading GB from a cloud service while streaming music off youtube.

I wasn't expecting 17 real world hours but I was hoping for 8 through heavy use which I might get. I'll just have to make sure to keep it plugged in while using photoshop and or compiling video in a low priority state.

Sorry for posting so much. I'm just excited. I'm used to building desktops for work computers and this is my first nice work laptop.

Doing normal productivity work using newish software - 8 hours should be no issue...

 

[gman713]

I noticed my battery was starting to drain using a mixture of Edge and Chrome. I lost about 25% in about 90 minutes. I installed Office 2016, installed Steam, installed Nvidia GeForce experience and then installed Oculus. I watched a little bit of video in Edge before it got down to about 71%. I also restarted several times. Is that normal for the first time you run just on battery for this machine? Oh, I also fired up The Witcher 3 for about another 90 minutes before the game quit and I was down to 4% remaining.