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

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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  1. Anonymous
    2016-02-04T02:19:23+00:00

    Keyboard attachment was one of the issues they tackled with the firmware update last week. So, that update didn't work for you?

    also, off topic here but a thought: the SB and Surface was Microsofts first foray into producing hardware (besides peripherals, I mean.) they wanted to come out of the gate blazing guns and decided to go with Skylake. We see what a mess it's caused and that sucks. But... Not to make excuses.. I think Microsoft is starting to see the nightmare its hardware producers over the years have had to fine tune and deal with. Apple is a great hardware company NOW, but it took 20 long years of clunky non working products to get here. So we can assume Microsoft will have the very same learning curve. Unfortunately. That's at our expense. So if u want and need a more reliable device, my recommendation is you look elsewhere. At least until SB2 or even 3. There is also a new surface 4 (not pro) coming out soon.

    Did they detail what issues were fixed around the keyboard attachment?  This last firmware update definitely didn't help with the battery drain issues that we are speculating may be caused by the keyboard release button, at least with my SB anyway.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-02-04T22:28:31+00:00

    I followed supports suggestions and turned SB on 24 hours after shutting down with battery at 100%.  Today it is at 95% so no solution so far.  I will re engage with support to see what other ideas they may have.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-02-09T21:33:27+00:00

    Just gor off support line and they have given me some more things to try.  BTW in the fie days since my last post the unit went down to 84% while shut down.  I will report back on my results.

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  4. 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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  5. 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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