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
    2016-02-03T08:17:10+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.

    I cannot accept this as am excuse and I am sure most of the SB owners won't.  Microsoft is not a new corporation and had been in the market for decades.  If they think they can get away with "20 long years" like apple to get their hardware stable, I can almost guarantee they will be out of business (at least the hardware one) in less than 5 years.  Comparing Microsoft today with Apple 20 years ago is just a stupid joke (no offense here, it is not a personal attack) and it is insulting to Microsoft.  The SB got sold out in its first week of launch and that says a lot about consumer confidence. 

    Now if Microsoft is willing to keep this confidence, I suggest they start to think NOW about how they will compensate the customers who bought their first premature generation of SB when SB2 or 3 come out fixing all those issues.  Otherwise we will feel deceived and used.

    Those who are happy and say they can live with losing only 5-10% of battery/per day while the device is "shut down",  probably didn't need a laptop anyway and would have been okay with a desktop power plugged 24/7.  Other people like Australians for instance need to fly at least 8-9 hours to reach their nearest foreign country in Asia (except New Zealand) and travelling to Europe could well take good 24 hours or more, so every 1% matters.

    I hope the issue will be resolved in the near future via driver/firmware upgrade, otherwise if it is a hardware issue that will only be fixed in the newer generations of SB, then I hope Microsoft will offer free or heavily discounted upgrade to the old customers who suffered with their immature overpriced device.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-02-03T05:31:10+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.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-02-03T04:31:38+00:00

    Thanks for all the input.  Mine is a new machine will all update and now we have reinstalled the battery drivers.  MS Support has indicated they will get back to me if there is no change to the problem.  I will let everyone know if there is any change once I give it a test.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-02-03T04:15:40+00:00

    Now this I see as an issue. Not all notebooks are the same, and I  suspect that even in power down mode some part of the machine is still active.  Depends on how it is made. In the old days desktop used small internal batteries to keep certain functions going, the clock for example. Notebooks rely on their built in batteries for these types of things.  

    I suspect part of the issue here is related to the release mechanism,  which apparently stays active even when powered off. Remember it is an electronic release not a mechanical one.   Microsoft most likely did this to prevent people from breaking the device by releasing it when powered off. Remember most two and ones are mechanical not electronic. I  can live with a 4% drop over two days. That is not an issue for me. Before it was losing about 10 to 15 percent a day, so the update has helped me.

    I  don't think that you can expect it to perform like other two and ones or notebooks that are far less complicated.  

    My battery drains about 5% total per 24 hours when it is either shut off completely, or in Hibernate.  This is only when the tablet is docked to the keyboard.  If I leave them undocked, there is zero battery drain over 24 hours.

    I truly believe it has to do with the electronic release mechanism, nothing to do with skylake.  However, a 5% battery drain to be able to press the release button is ridiculous.  I'd prefer to disable the release button when the device is off or in hibernate.  Maybe MS could make that an option the user could choose.  Guess it would be nice if MS would even acknowledge there is an issue here.  We're on page 22 of this thread, and not a peep from MS.  pretty sad.

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-02-03T04:08:55+00:00

    Just got off with support.  they had me uninstall the battery drivers (not delete) and restart.  I will allow to recharge and find out if it helped tomorrow.

    I tried this about a month ago, didn't help me, but curious if you see better results

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