Tracking Battery Life

[kmthang]

Yes, I do not have any antivirus software installed. My only "protection" is creating Restore Point before installing a new "unsecured" program and using adblock plus in Mozilla Firefox with all protections on. I install a lot of add-ons (especially VPN/tunneling tools/dictionary tools) in it too. And yes I have pinned tabs such as facebook and gmail.

If changing my browser ecosystem would give me extra 2-3 hours of runtime, I'm really intrigued to give it a try to Firefox. I used to be a heavy Firefox user before until I started using Drive, Keep, Google Calendar, pinned tabs and espeically their cloud connect feature which I love so much about. However I gotta admit, Chrome does consume a lot of juice and it's very noticeable.

I'll give it a go and report back if I do see improvements.

Edit: I installed Firefox and surprisingly it was showing a high usage in RAM for very little amount of things going on in it compared to my Chrome usage. I have about another 20+ chome instances that the task manager doesn't include which total to about 1 GB of RAM for Chrome alone but man, 4 tabs open in that Firefox and it's already over at 600 MB, and only 3 extensions installed so far (lastpass, session manager and abp). I must be doing something wrong because all I see online is people saying how RAM efficient Firefox is compared to Chrome :/.

 

[surfacebookinuk]

So do you guys believe that Firefox isbthe most battery efficient browser out there? Scrolling is a bit of an issue when I tried using it on my surface.
I used to use Chrome but after buying my surface I got around to using Edge so far but the lack of adblocker is truly irritating some times.
Leeshor I believe made a guide to install adblock capabilities on edge but I am too hesitant of tweaking my device...
Should I go for Firefox again or is there a way I could use Chrome more battery efficiently??

 

[kmthang]

So do you guys believe that Firefox isbthe most battery efficient browser out there? Scrolling is a bit of an issue when I tried using it on my surface.
I used to use Chrome but after buying my surface I got around to using Edge so far but the lack of adblocker is truly irritating some times.
Leeshor I believe made a guide to install adblock capabilities on edge but I am too hesitant of tweaking my device...
Should I go for Firefox again or is there a way I could use Chrome more battery efficiently??

I can't say for sure if FF is really saving us battery but from my brief experience with FF in the past 2 days, I noticed it consumed a lot of RAM for the amount of tabs/extension I used.

For the scrolling issue with FF, have you try disabling FF's smooth scrolling feature in the settings?

 

[surfacebookinuk]

Yeah that could do the trick thank you! But still curious what others' usage has to say.

Edit: you were right. Edge was running smoothly for most occasions and Firefox began to cause the fan to kick in last night while I tried some online streaming. Very disappointed unistalled it and now thinking about alternatives

 

[sattie_c]

Hi,

I'm a newbie and recently purchased a pro 4 i5 4gb 128gb.

Just using it for web surfacing yesterday and the battery drain was shocking. I've run the report and the results show the battery drained 44% in just one and half hours , what a joke!!!!

I've set to Battery saver and suggested for brightness. Disabled any wifi when in sleep. All updates have been done. At this current rate I would get just over 3 hours of just pure web surfing on the pro 4.

I have the type cover also attached.

Is there an issue with my pro 4?

Any other ways to increase battery life?

 

[leeshor]

Welcome to the forum @sattie_c

There are quite a few posts like your with new Surface devices and it's not uncommon for that to happen in the first several days of use. Do some deep discharges and full charges and it should stabilize.

 

[Philtastic]

Hi,

I'm a newbie and recently purchased a pro 4 i5 4gb 128gb.

Just using it for web surfacing yesterday and the battery drain was shocking. I've run the report and the results show the battery drained 44% in just one and half hours , what a joke!!!!

I've set to Battery saver and suggested for brightness. Disabled any wifi when in sleep. All updates have been done. At this current rate I would get just over 3 hours of just pure web surfing on the pro 4.

I have the type cover also attached.

Is there an issue with my pro 4?

Any other ways to increase battery life?

As leeshor alludes to, your new device is doing a whole lot of things in the background that are standard for Windows to do, things such as indexing all of the files on your SSD (including the possibly gigs of data you may have just installed/transferred on to it), doing anti-virus scans on any new files that you've put on it (again, could be gigs worth which would take a while to scan), downloading and installing automatic Windows updates, automatically updating apps, and syncing your OneDrive if you've set that up.

Give it a couple of days to settle down and then test the battery life. If it's not 6+ hours with light use, then you might have a hardware issue.

 

[sattie_c]

Welcome to the forum @sattie_c

There are quite a few posts like your with new Surface devices and it's not uncommon for that to happen in the first several days of use. Do some deep discharges and full charges and it should stabilize.

OK, I will continue to use and hopefully see some improvements over the next week or so.

 

[sattie_c]

As leeshor alludes to, your new device is doing a whole lot of things in the background that are standard for Windows to do, things such as indexing all of the files on your SSD (including the possibly gigs of data you may have just installed/transferred on to it), doing anti-virus scans on any new files that you've put on it (again, could be gigs worth which would take a while to scan), downloading and installing automatic Windows updates, automatically updating apps, and syncing your OneDrive if you've set that up.

Give it a couple of days to settle down and then test the battery life. If it's not 6+ hours with light use, then you might have a hardware issue.

Thanks Phil, will monitor, be great if I can get 6+ hours

 

[Zkyevolved]

This is for sure a software issue. This device I have USED To get 8+ hours of battery life with minimal issues, but for some reason since the February update I am getting 4-5 hours AT MOST with battery barely touching my device. No hardware issues, just software.

 

[sattie_c]

Don't think the sleep is working either, drained 35% in one and half hours earlier today. I pressed the power button which should place into sleep mode.

 

[leeshor]

Some of these updates are making some changes in some of the settings. I can't pinpoint which ones but I find myself going back over them now and then and find one not being what I remembered. The last update had zero affect on my battery life.