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
    2015-12-04T18:15:11+00:00

    Yes, I'm aware that my "weekend" expectation is...mmm...a bit unrealistic :-)

    My point is that it's just unbelievable to me that something so glaringly wrong escaped testing.

    I do not think your "weekend" expectation is unrealistic at all.  The SP4, for example, (and probably the SB) has a warning on the box:  "Battery has limited recharge cycles and may eventually need to be replaced by an authorizes service provider."  All the power issuea -- likely software-caused -- thus reduce the hardware life of this product."  I would hope that that an issue that impacts the hardware so significantly would cause Microsoft to work overtime on this issue.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-12-04T18:00:21+00:00

    I wanted the dGPU model, too, since I work in Photoshop, Bridge and Lightroom for a Photoshop class I'm currently taking. As an amateur photographer, I don't want there to be any system lags, etc. However, after the 12/2 Hardware Update that apparently fixed the Intel HD Driver issues, now my Photoshop has disabled features like Perspective Warp that the video card assists with. I may have been better off with a Surface Pro 3, apparently.

    Someone else reported that the 12/2 update disabled their Nvidia dGPU (you can look by going to Device Manager) but detaching and then reattaching the screen brought it back. Not sure if they have to do that every time as my SB isn't having that problem but give it a shot. It sounds like that is what may be happening to you.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-12-04T17:53:33+00:00

    To be fair, I don't think every model is exhibiting these behaviors, we just hear about all the 'bad stories' since we are looking in these forums for answers. I know more than a few people who have SB's who have NO ISSUES at all. So while I think battery life could be improved across the whole Surface line of products, I don't feel every user is experiencing the same level of battery drain that others are. I don't think mine will be resolved until I take the SB back to get it replaced in a couple of weeks. We'll see how that one fares under my same working conditions, which is pretty light.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-12-04T17:48:24+00:00

    Yes, I'm aware that my "weekend" expectation is...mmm...a bit unrealistic :-)

    My point is that it's just unbelievable to me that something so glaringly wrong escaped testing.

    I did another measurement test on my "good" SB. 45min of sleep took it down from 97.5% to 95.7%. The top felt warm all that time, never really cooled completely.

    These numbers show a 1.7w consumption during sleep which should yield 41 theoretical hours of sleep on a full battery.

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-12-04T17:30:29+00:00

    Eh, the Surfacebook launched on the 26th of October and since then there have been a few regular updates pushed out by Microsoft in a span of less than a month and half - so all in all, they're doing a pretty good job of supporting their product and providing fixes in a timely manner. Sometimes it takes time to find the causes of these things. 

    Does it mean they'll work over the weekend? No, but they are actively looking in to things and addressing them.

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