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
    2016-03-03T20:12:28+00:00

    Ok, mixed news.  After applying the late Feb update, battery drain seemed to resolve itself.  Created the detached problem and the front camera problem when using Hello.  Mar 1 update fixed those two items, but when rebooted they reappeared.  Did the whole discharge and recharge deal again, and after 25 hours shutdown and unplugged battery one went to 96.4% and batt 2 stayed at 100%.  Looks like we are back to the drawing board.  I will fill let you know what I find out.

    Same thing here.  Prior to the Feb 2016 firmware update, at least my SB was able to hold charge after completely shutdown in about 60% of the time.  Post Feb 2016 updates, both SB battery 1 and battery 2 drained about 5% overnight consistently 100% of the time.  

    The only thing I haven't tried is completely wiping the SB clean and re-install Windows.  Might try that this weekend and see.

    Very frustrated!

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-03-03T20:29:45+00:00

    The Hello camera not working at startup and the attach-detach-autorotate issues were corrected for me by disabling Fast Startup in the power button settings, where I also disabled Hibernate.  (I believe that Fast Startup is a form of Hibernate.)

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-03-05T23:22:54+00:00

    Support had me uninstall the battery drivers and restart.  That resolved the detach screen and camera issues.  Shut down for 22 hours.  Batt one went down less than one percent, Batt 2 stayed at 100.  Shut down for 25 hours and turned on.  Batt one down 2.3% from the day before and Batt 2 down 3.9% from the day before.  Better, but still not ideal.  I will get on support again to see if we can improve.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-03-15T12:34:00+00:00

    For those who are experiencing battery drain or other issues after the latest firmware update, take a look at the following post and follow the instructions.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/49g46p/i_am_going_to_make_one_post_to_convey_a_fix_for/

    It seems that Surfacebooks shipped with a corrupted system file and this is causing issues.

    Using the above instructions I have fixed a corrupt system file on my machine, and it is behaving much more normally now (1-2% drain in sleep - most of the time).

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-03-16T19:23:33+00:00

    So after all the fixes and such, I have been watching my machine since 3/3.  I have turned it on 6 times since then, then each time turned off.  Battery 1 started at 96.6 on the 3rd and is at 69.8 today 10 days later.  Battery 2 started at 100 and is now down to 85.3.  Not fixed completely, but it can sit around a week or so and still have enough power for a 4 or 5 hour flight.  My guess is it will keep getting better.

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