Which Surface Pro 4 issues remain?

[Philtastic]

Nope, that's not my case ... I'm running a windows defender scan to see if it finds any virus's, although I haven't downloaded anything strange. In regards to the task manager, I don't see anything that could be the culprit, but maybe you could tell me of any of these stand out as ones I could end. They mostly look like Windows tasks.

I saw my Up Time was very high, so I did a reboot, a cold reboot and a hard reboot... Finally, by pressing the power and volume down was I able to reboot the PC and restart that counter.

Another thing that I did was make a local account (brand new one) and then see if the speed dropped. CPU Utilization was at 1%, solidly (maybe for like 10 seconds, and then for 1 second it would jump to 2 or 3)... Didn't move... But speed moved always, and again, over 1 GHz... but CPU isn't budging...

Any ideas short of having to reinstall windows, once again....?

Even after uninstalling a bunch of software and ending processes, it stayed between .8 and 1.2 always.... Well, it had spikes, like with yours as well, but generally speaking it was higher... Is there any way to see what specific process is keeping the CPU cycled higher? A while back I installed that Intel program on another SP4, and I got way worse battery life because it was always logging everything. So I'd prefer not to use that one. But any other suggestions? I HATE having to reformat devices. I despise doing on my desktop once a year, and in 3 months I've done it 8 times on my various SP4s I've had...

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Going through your images, I couldn't spot anything in particular that I think would do this but I have a couple of ideas. The first is whether you are using some kind of power management program that's screwing up how far the CPU can downclock (I noticed that you had BatteryBar installed which has some power profiles). The second that I have is whether you have turned off sharing Windows 10 updates to other computers, including random people through the internet. This is something that I turned off of every one of my PCs since I don't want to waste my bandwidth and power hosting Microsoft's updates. It's possible that this is something that might be cutting a lot of people's battery lives short while mine seems fine. You can find this option under Windows Update settings.

 

[Zkyevolved]

Going through your images, I couldn't spot anything in particular that I think would do this but I have a couple of ideas. The first is whether you are using some kind of power management program that's screwing up how far the CPU can downclock (I noticed that you had BatteryBar installed which has some power profiles). The second that I have is whether you have turned off sharing Windows 10 updates to other computers, including random people through the internet. This is something that I turned off of every one of my PCs since I don't want to waste my bandwidth and power hosting Microsoft's updates. It's possible that this is something that might be cutting a lot of people's battery lives short while mine seems fine. You can find this option under Windows Update settings.

Thanks, I'll look into this. This is actually my first SP4 that isn't giving me between 7 and 10 hours of battery life. Well, every device gave me about 5 hours of battery life, but with the custom profiles that put my CPU at 50% when unplugged, that always gave me 7-10! Maybe a fresh install is in order.

 

[Zkyevolved]

Going through your images, I couldn't spot anything in particular that I think would do this but I have a couple of ideas. The first is whether you are using some kind of power management program that's screwing up how far the CPU can downclock (I noticed that you had BatteryBar installed which has some power profiles). The second that I have is whether you have turned off sharing Windows 10 updates to other computers, including random people through the internet. This is something that I turned off of every one of my PCs since I don't want to waste my bandwidth and power hosting Microsoft's updates. It's possible that this is something that might be cutting a lot of people's battery lives short while mine seems fine. You can find this option under Windows Update settings.

Yeah, so I forgot I had a second SP4, same model i5 256 8gb. I didn't even connect it to wifi. New device out of the box, it had CPU speed at around 1ghz most of the time, the same as my SP4. Either way, I reformated my Sp4 and it has the same speeds at idle... So, I'm guessing it must be a software bug that's common since I have 2 SP4s from different batches, one fresh install out of the box, another with my apps, with very similar speeds at idle.

My partner has a SP3, and I checked it out at idle (over a year old with 0 reg edits or configuration changes seeing as computer modification isn't up my partner's alley), and it idled at .6-.7 permanently with an occasion spike to 1 (this with browsers open and apps open).... It MUST be a software issue (like a driver). Otherwise, I can't explain it.

 

[Philtastic]

Yeah, so I forgot I had a second SP4, same model i5 256 8gb. I didn't even connect it to wifi. New device out of the box, it had CPU speed at around 1ghz most of the time, the same as my SP4. Either way, I reformated my Sp4 and it has the same speeds at idle... So, I'm guessing it must be a software bug that's common since I have 2 SP4s from different batches, one fresh install out of the box, another with my apps, with very similar speeds at idle.

My partner has a SP3, and I checked it out at idle (over a year old with 0 reg edits or configuration changes seeing as computer modification isn't up my partner's alley), and it idled at .6-.7 permanently with an occasion spike to 1 (this with browsers open and apps open).... It MUST be a software issue (like a driver). Otherwise, I can't explain it.

That's interesting. I can understand a new device being constantly active because it's indexing and possibly updating (when on wifi) constantly. In fact, what's the longest period of time that you've had the SP4 without refreshing/reformatting?

 

[Zkyevolved]

That's interesting. I can understand a new device being constantly active because it's indexing and possibly updating (when on wifi) constantly. In fact, what's the longest period of time that you've had the SP4 without refreshing/reformatting?

About two weeks. After all. 6 sp4 in 3 months. Lol.

 

[jnjroach]

New Firmware Update today includes many fixes including Power Management and Video:

 

[Zkyevolved]

Yes, these new firmware updates have improved sleep a lot. I went from 78% when going to bed to 77% upon waking up, but it dropped to 76 within the minute, and since then it has been rather stable. So 2% over 6 hours is good! I'm a happy camper in this case for sleeping. It did require about 3 restarts though to apply all the updates.

 

[wynand32]

Well, closed the Type Cover on my SP4 about an hour ago. Just checked it again and it's warm to the touch and it went from 100% to 94% battery life. That's not at all encouraging.

 

[Philtastic]

Yeah, so I forgot I had a second SP4, same model i5 256 8gb. I didn't even connect it to wifi. New device out of the box, it had CPU speed at around 1ghz most of the time, the same as my SP4. Either way, I reformated my Sp4 and it has the same speeds at idle... So, I'm guessing it must be a software bug that's common since I have 2 SP4s from different batches, one fresh install out of the box, another with my apps, with very similar speeds at idle.

My partner has a SP3, and I checked it out at idle (over a year old with 0 reg edits or configuration changes seeing as computer modification isn't up my partner's alley), and it idled at .6-.7 permanently with an occasion spike to 1 (this with browsers open and apps open).... It MUST be a software issue (like a driver). Otherwise, I can't explain it.

A quick thing that I noticed last night when I had my SP4 in tablet mode (something that I rarely use): my device was idling at ~1 GHz according to task manager. At first, I thought maybe this was due to the new firmware messing up my device BUT it turns out that Task Manager expanded to a full screen requires far more CPU than when it's a smaller window. Once I shrunk it back down to a small window, CPU went back down to 0.6-0.7 GHz. It must have something to do with how big the graph is. So, yeah, not sure if this makes a difference in your analysis of your devices but thought I'd throw that out there.

 

[Zkyevolved]

A quick thing that I noticed last night when I had my SP4 in tablet mode (something that I rarely use): my device was idling at ~1 GHz according to task manager. At first, I thought maybe this was due to the new firmware messing up my device BUT it turns out that Task Manager expanded to a full screen requires far more CPU than when it's a smaller window. Once I shrunk it back down to a small window, CPU went back down to 0.6-0.7 GHz. It must have something to do with how big the graph is. So, yeah, not sure if this makes a difference in your analysis of your devices but thought I'd throw that out there.

Thanks for the idea I'll certainly give it a try but one thing is for sure I'm currently enjoying being able to sleep it

 

[GreyFox7]

A quick thing that I noticed last night when I had my SP4 in tablet mode (something that I rarely use): my device was idling at ~1 GHz according to task manager. At first, I thought maybe this was due to the new firmware messing up my device BUT it turns out that Task Manager expanded to a full screen requires far more CPU than when it's a smaller window. Once I shrunk it back down to a small window, CPU went back down to 0.6-0.7 GHz. It must have something to do with how big the graph is. So, yeah, not sure if this makes a difference in your analysis of your devices but thought I'd throw that out there.

Set the Task Manager Update Speed to low otherwise it uses a lot of CPU.