surface book battery drain while shut down

Anonymous
2015-12-09T16:09:58+00:00

Split from this thread.

I have been noticing that when I shutdown my surface book, when I power it on the next day the battery has drained some. If I leave it off for a couple of days it will drain down from 100% to around 85% or lower.

I disabled fast startup... and then just decided to disable hibernation altogether. That didn't help.

I have windows hello disabled, but that shouldn't matter anyway since I'm shutting it down, not sleeping.

Some searching and I found a general windows 10 issue with the "Intel Management Engine Interface" driver. Some say that v11 can cause this issue. One solution that I have seen suggested is to go into device manager and in the power management tab for this device uncheck the option that allows windows to power it down to save power. I tried that and it didn't help.

Others have suggested downgrading the driver from v11 to v9 or v10, but I don't know where to get v9 or v10 of this driver that is compatible with the surface book. Anyone know if one of the downloads on Intel's site would be compatible?

So, has anyone else noticed this issue and know of a fix?

Surface | Surface Book | Power and battery

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-12-04T16:35:30+00:00

    I don't think the graphics card is on much, but I don't know how to tell. My model is overpowered for what I generally do but I need that power for a few specific engineering applications I use once or twice a week.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-12-04T16:23:26+00:00

    The funny thing is, I wonder with the non-dGPU base model if you'd get more battery life out of it?  (You say the i7 is way overpowered for what you do.) This is why I got the cheaper i5 256gb model, but experience same issues, sadly.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-12-04T16:15:56+00:00

    I think the battery loss on shutdown is a separate problem (rare) than the battery loss on sleep, which pretty much everyone experiences. 

    I typically get 6-7 hours of battery life with power saver on, 50-60% brightness, with a lot of engineering programs open. I can typically always have power saver on (i7, 16GB RAM) because it's so overpowered for my typical tasks. It goes as low as 3-4 hours if I'm plugged into an HD TV streaming Netflix and also working on the laptop screen. I once stretched it to about 9-10 hours on very low brightness, WiFi off, location off, Bluetooth off, with only OneNote open. 

    My "3 hour" battery in the screen seems to always last 3 hours in tablet mode, but the base seems to be the part not living up to the 8-9 hour as advertised. This seems to be typical from what I've read other places.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-12-04T16:03:01+00:00

    Yes, so what I take from that is: you have a good system, I have a faulty one.  Mine is a SB i5 256GB 8 GB ram dGPU model. After a complete overnight shutdown, mine loses 15-20% consistently and only lasts 6 hrs max with light use and battery saver on.

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-12-04T15:58:56+00:00

    Vansover: That actually isn't too bad, 0.12 w, not too far off the mark for most laptops.

    What some of us are seeing (and me) is.. 20-30% battery loss while in sleep mode for 2-3 hours, and up to 15% battery loss after a hard shutdown (overnight) or more. Where is the power going?! If I completely shut everything down, where is that 15-20% going overnight? I just don't get it.

    Seems like some of us have lemons, and others have a better experience.

    I am currently using battery saver, have turned off Cortana, have turned off Hello, and have limited my startup items. I also changed my power savings to Hibernation instead of Sleep mode with lid closed. I'm going to see if this makes any difference before returning my SB in 2 weeks.

    I just turned my SB i7, 512GB, on this morning after doing a complete shutdown last night.  This morning my battery icon shows 99% battery remaining immediately after startup.

    My Surface Book is at factory defaults except for turning off Adaptive Brightness.  My screen is at the default of 50%.  I have set up Hello Face Recognition which I like more than I ever thought I would.  I use Cortana.  Since the Dec 2nd update I've not had a single video failure/recovery error.

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