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
    2016-02-18T21:52:05+00:00

    The update 17/02/2016 did not fix the battery draining issue on my SB either. My SB is draining from 100% to 97% after 10 hours in shutdown.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-02-18T17:34:31+00:00

    I replaced my SB three times until I get an almost perfect one. The last issue was the batter drain while shut down. However, after the last few updates my battery life has been better. It does not drain nearly as much as before, maybe 1-2% in 24 hours. I agree that this should still not be happening, but I believe that it's a hardware defect with the keyboard being always on (since you can detach the screen when it's completely off). I don't believe it will be completely fixed until the next SB. I just wish Microsoft would admit to the issue.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-02-18T17:20:03+00:00

    I have had the same problem. 3 trips now to the MS Store and they have offered to completely replace my system after all the updates etc. Not sure if I should take them up on it because Im afraid its just going to happen again.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-02-18T13:09:44+00:00

    Okay here's what I know about this issue:

    • The update today (2016-02-18) did not fix the base drain issue.
    • Connected sleep with the base connected is now at 400mW. Without is 80-100mW. The base is drawing a constant ~300mW (works out to ~10% per day).
    • This drain is roughly the same when in standby, shutdown, or even completely disconnected.
    • You can tell power is being used because you can hear a whine coming from the base even when disconnected from the tablet unit (listen very carefully near the dock/power connector).
    • As MS have not yet fixed this, it is quite likely they won't be able to with software/firmware updates. It is likely a design failure at the hardware level.
    • Therefore, they are likely never going to give an answer on this. Will probably require a second gen of SB to actually resolve.

    To be honest I'd be happy if they just come out and tell the truth as it is, rather than providing absolutely no information on the topic.

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-02-10T00:23:13+00:00

    The January 27 update did nothing for me.  Left SB shutdown and unplugged it for 2 days and battery 1 was at 89% and battery 2 was at 82%.  Very frustrating.

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