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
    2016-03-26T04:04:25+00:00

    I think you are right. It looks like if the type cover I attached on my surface 3, battery will drain. But if I disconnect the type cover and shut down, it doesnt drain. It is inconvenient to have to detach the type cover everytime though.

    Do we know whether this is an open bug with Microsoft? I don't see anything from Microsoft regarding this (ie shut down issue). Just around battery drain with sleep.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-03-25T06:50:11+00:00

    You're supposed to leave the keyboard attached on the SB, it's considered part of the machine.  Perhaps you're thinking of the SP4?

    That said, I think it could be related to the keyboard.  I have tested this several times and the drain has rarely happened when the clipboard was detached before shutting down.  With the keyboard attached, it's about half as likely to see battery drain when I shut down from Linux as from Windows. (not statistically significant as I've only tested 5 times each way)  That may be due to the lack of drivers for the base keyboard and discrete graphics in Linux, though USB works fine and I see the second battery.  That said, I have seen both excessive battery drain (defined as 4-15% drain while shut down for 12 hours) and no battery drain while shut down (defined as 2% or less in 12 hours) from both operating systems.

    The battery drain I've seen is usually in the clipboard, but I've seen it also in the base only or in both at the same time.  Seems to me it could be the discrete graphics or the battery charger in the base.  I once had a Transformer tablet that had similar issues with battery drain in the removable keyboard/battery base when it was shut down.

    Most likely, though: Intel VPro.  That's meant to be out of band management, right?  Meaning it has hooks to allow remote wake-up of the machine with the right network signal, or at least that's what it means on server systems. Listening for that signal takes power, and wasn't VPro firmware updated recently? 

    There's no option in the EFI/BIOS currently to disable VPro.  Can we at least get that option enabled, Microsoft?

    (p.s. for those continually confused, this thread is about battery drain while shut down with fast boot turned off, not sleep or any other suspend mode.  Comments about battery drain in sleep mode belong in a different thread.)

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-03-24T09:55:22+00:00

    Hi,

    This may be due to leaving your keyboard plugged in.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-03-24T05:13:41+00:00

    My SB does that occasionally, really wows me, then sometimes also.. It doesn't. I have found a lot of issues to be intermittent. But if you keep you machine on hibernate only and kill fast startup, it works mostly great. Still poor battery life overall but I blame Windows 10 and Intel drivers.

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-03-24T04:09:32+00:00

    so hibernate is definitely performing better than shut down.  I hibernated for 12 hours and lost 1%.  I will try to shut down tonight and see what it is like again.

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