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
    2015-12-12T11:32:58+00:00

    I agree with above post. I think it's become acceptable for people to say "well nothing is perfect and all machines do this or that" .  

    It's the low expectations or our willingness to pay this kind of money and just come to expect these things to happen.  And you know what? Who can blame Apple and MS for this?  I mean, judging from some willing to accept mediocrity, people are just willing to accept it and move on.  Must be awesome to have $2000 lying around with a shrug of the shoulders. 

    So go ahead.  Talk away about all the issues everyone experiencing with 1st Gen devices and how we should "expect" this kind of performance.  

    Guess  just expect more from a $2000 device. 

    It's this kind of acceptance of mediocrity that permeates our society lately as well.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-12-12T09:50:10+00:00

    Hi All,

    Well, I've had my SB for about 1.5 weeks and the battery experience has not been good. First, my SB arrived completed dead/battery drained. I had to plug it in to power up.

    Then for 3 days of use, I was getting about 4-5 hours. After a few complete run down from 100% to around 2%-3%, recharge to 100%, the performance seem to have increased. I have been using it for work and getting about 8-9 hours. (I had set the SB to NEVER sleep on batter so I can test endurance.) I was thinking that perhaps a few full drain/recharge cycle was the cure for the poor battery life. Although, I'm not sure about the whole 12 hours of use per Panos.

    Anyway, I had the SB fully charged to 100% yesterday and left it powered off/shut down. Well, less than 24 hours later, I turned it on an the battery was completely drained. This is ridiculous and very disappointing. I have a hard time believing Microsoft did experience this with the units before releasing. If they did, they knowingly released a bad product. (Class action anyone?)

    I love the SB in every way but the battery problem is making me rethink the purchase. The amount of time that others have spent on returning, rebuilding, returning, rebuilding. etc. is not what a premium device experience should be. :-(

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-12-12T03:09:18+00:00

    Not that anyone needs to agree and add more clutter to the discussion but i have the same issue only worse, Microsoft early next year with a fix is **** to this powerdrain issue, we need moee than an appolgy for a $1,700 system that dies in an hour.

    If your SB dies in an hour it is obviously defective.  Take it to a Microsoft Store and they should replace it with a new one.  I'm sure you will also get an apology.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-12-12T03:01:06+00:00

    Not that anyone needs to agree and add more clutter to the discussion but i have the same issue only worse, Microsoft early next year with a fix is **** to this powerdrain issue, we need moee than an appolgy for a $1,700 system that dies in an hour.

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-12-12T02:49:57+00:00

    I'm not interested in using one of the other Skylake laptops. They are more than likely experiencing their own type of issues. I'm using hibernate and it's working just fine (as a temporary fix) and I do have faith that MS will issue a fix for the power issues soon. They even responded to a few posts of mine (Josh) to reassure me it is coming. The question is... when? And will us early adopters wait that long? It appears some just couldn't. I'm patient and I love my SB. 

    BB

    I'd have to be one of the earliest of the early adopters.  I had pre-ordered my i7, 16GB, 512GB, on October 7th, the morning that pre-orders opened.  I was standing first in line when the Atlanta Microsoft Store opened on October 26th.  And when they handed me my Surface Book they told me that I was the first person in the state of Georgia to buy one.  So I am well past a 30 day return and it wouldn't make any difference to me anyway.  My SB is cosmetically perfect and all my software runs perfectly.  I mainly run Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation, Microsoft Visual Studio 2015, Microsoft Office 365 and Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop CC.  All my software scales beautifully to the SB screen.  I love everything about my SB except how it sleeps and I have every confidence that will be taken care of in January.  I've owned many dozens of computers since my first IBM PC in 1982.  My Surface Book is the best one yet.  I really do love this computer.

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