Surface Laptop Studio will not charge occasionally / depletes battery at alarming rate.

Anonymous
2022-03-05T23:38:23+00:00

Every once in awhile my Surface Laptop Studio will refuse to charge - or atleast it says it's charging but clearly isn't. The battery then depletes at a rate of almost 1% every minute until in shuts off at 0%. Then I have to repeatedly restart it, plug in charging cable, for almost an hour to get it to start charging again. This isn't a charger issue. This is possibly some odd software issue.

Why Microsoft wants be to make a post instead of talking to an employee is beyond me.

Surface | Surface Laptop | Power and battery

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous
2022-10-27T16:30:56+00:00

Marking as Answered to raise visibility - Updated July 17, 2023

Thank you for your patience and feedback as we worked on this. A fix is now available through Windows Update. After installing the update, please restart (not Shutdown) your Surface Laptop Studio. For more information about updates for your Surface available through Windows Update see Download drivers and firmware for your Surface

For more details about Surface Laptop Update History, please see Surface Laptop Studio Update History.

If the issue continues to occur, here is a workaround that has helped others start charging again:

  1. Connect your Surface power supply and make sure the power connector light is on.
  2. Save all your work and shutdown your Surface.
  3. Once shutdown, press and hold down the power button, you will see the Windows logo screen flash and then turn off, continue to hold down the power button (about 20 seconds) until you see the Windows logo screen flash again and then release the power button.

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-08-07T08:22:45+00:00

    Have you tried the battery driver re-install described earlier in this thread on either PC? It seems to have worked on mine (so far), but others have said it didn't fix theirs.

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-08-06T20:14:23+00:00

    Hi John Neil_J

    As someone else mentioned in this thread there are some other social media platforms where this has been reported and discussed.

    To put it simply the highlighted text just dissapears. This means that the laptop finds the cable fine but it just refuses to charge the battery.

    I know that is probably not something you are handling yourself but maybe a button in the future updates to force start charging will help with this issue.

    The full shutdown (10 sec power button) does the trick, but not always. Therfore it is not a reliable workaround all the time.

    Image https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/qgp5lf/fixed_surface_laptop_studio_not_charging/

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-08-06T19:41:25+00:00

    I am a Surface Laptop Studio user as well; in fact, I can confirm the exact same issue with two Surface Laptop Studios that I use (one is my personal laptop, the other is my work laptop). The personal laptop was purchased on February 7th 2022, the work laptop on February 14th 2022.

    To be clear: this issue becomes apparent after I receive a notice that the battery percentage is reaching the threshold for going into battery saving mode (20% on my laptops). At that point, I plug my Surface Laptop Studio in, after which the laptop actually recognizes being plugged in. In the battery settings, the the graph goes from yellow bars to blue bars (indicating it should be charging, from the moment I plugged it in). However, the percentage would only drop at the same rate uninterrupted as it did before it was charging.

    I've tried a phone charger plugged into one of the USB ports, but it does not start charging whatsoever.

    When it reaches 3%, my laptop(s) start panicking ("please charge your battery", "battery low"), and ultimately turns off into hibernation. When I turn it on again, the issue remains until the laptop battery reaches 0%. Then, it just squarely goes black (I reacon because it reaches the software threshold of what would be 0%). Then, I can't turn it on for a while; only I assume until it has gathered enough charge to boot.

    Only then, the laptop starts charging again.

    Once again, this applies to both laptops. They have exactly the same specs: i7 processor, 32GB RAM, 1TB hard drive and NVIDIA RTX3050 GPU.

    For what it's worth, there are more testimonials and thoughts on this issue on Reddit; more people who are lead to believe it is a software issue (the battery preservation software, the actual functionality that if you keep the battery plugged, it will stop charging to not overload the battery; the one with the heart icon in the battery icon? If this feature goes rogue, that would explain why the battery is not charging until it reaches 0%). Bear in mind that this is Reddit, so apart from testimonials you also get some edgy comments.

    Here is a particularly like-minded thread about this issue:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/qgp5lf/fixed_surface_laptop_studio_not_charging/

    Could anyone from Microsoft respond to this?

    Addition to my message

    Based on follow-up questions on this thread, I like to add to my message:

    • I did try a driver reset. It didn't work.
    • I have two official Microsoft chargers: one that shipped with this laptop (102W) and one that I bought separately for my previous Surface Book as a replacement for a broken charger (127W). Both chargers seem to yield the same result.
    • I tried flipping the charger around , so the connectors are the other way around. No avail.
    • I think this issue recurs every month or so. Though that I am slightly worried about my battery, the Surface Diagnostics Toolkit indicates to me that the battery capacity is still 99% of what it should be, and the graph shows no real degradation of battery capacity.
    • Indeed, a hard reboot seems to temporarily work. Until the next time it happens.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-08-04T08:27:57+00:00

    I was gonna use whatever I could find around the house. I'm currently seeing what's available on Amazon at a higher wattage output (102w is recommended for my Studio). Microsoft has some advice on wattage in the article below. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/usb-c-and-fast-charging-for-surface-d320ab19-e4ed-c36d-7458-7d7aec69d34a

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