i5/256 Surface Pro 4 overheats and battery drains while 'sleeping'

Split from this thread.

My SP4 gets very hot and drains the battery very fast even though it is asleep. I found it very hot in its sleeve and down to 28% earlier today. Found it dead later in the afternoon. This is one of MANY issues this device has.

(My SP4 is not part of the insider program)

I had  similar issues with my surface pro 4 I-5 unit, including battery drain while asleep and even battery drain while doing ordinary surfing and none power hungry functions.  Also the fan was also running a bit "too much" for my tastes and the device was getting hot under normal operations. 

I conducted battery drain tests on it while watching a 1:47 minute  DVD movie with 50 percent brightness and the device only had 11 per cent left after the movie.  This was not acceptable so I contacted Microsoft support and this is what happened:

The tech listened to my complaints and had me hold the power button for 60 seconds without releasing it.  After this he had me power the unit up again and check for any new windows updates, which there was not any.  Then he had me make a note of the battery percentage and instructed me to play a video for a few minutes (while he waited I must admit).  I did not tell him but I turned the brightness up to 75 percent while watching the video.  After watching the video for about 3 minutes he had me check the percentage and amazingly the numbers had not changed! 

I did not get too excited but told him that battery indicators often take jumps a few percentages during power drain so he had me watch the video again to check my theory.  (I forgot to mention that during all of this time the fan never came on-not once and the unit did not get warm) After watching the video again for about 2 minutes the power meter only dropped by about 1 per cent.  My device has been operating fantastic since this phone encounter.  No heat; and honestly I have not heard the fan one single time in the last 4 days of use!  I checked the battery percentage of the device a couple of times before it went to sleep and went back to it a couple hours later and the percentage was "still the same". Most important is my battery performance is much better and lasts much longer.  Its hard to put a number on how long it will last on a charge but I can tell you this, I now use the device without constantly watching the battery indicator and I now am enjoying it much more, for this is truly a very good model. 

The tech explained to me that sometimes when the unit comes from the factory the drivers are not properly seated or (some other word he used) and that when I held the power button down it forced them to reset themselves.   This really was the trick for me, and I hope this works for others.  This is also proof that the Surface Pro 4 units might just have minor bug issues that can easily be corrected by working with Microsoft.  Hope this helps someone like it did for me.

I have the sp4 i7 512 fully updated as of today and am losing ~18% battery per hour of 'sleep'. The biggest offender is Intel Iris Graphics 540 (\_SB.PCI0.GFX0) at 84% of active time and CPU C0 Time at 59% of active time.

For a high end device this is pretty terrible:


Very well said and totally agree!

We appreciate the continued feedback - keep it coming.  Know that we are investigating this and although not part of the 12/3/2015 update we hope to have it corrected in a future update. Please stay tuned.

Thanks,

Josh

"We hope to have it corrected in a future update" and "please stay tuned" do not provide a basis for trust that this will be solved for the customers.  If Microsoft does not correct this issue, and quickly, three things will probably happen:  (1) Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book sales will come to a screeching halt as the main stream (not tech) press is further made aware of this issue; (2) grounds for a class action lawsuit for bait and switch are obvious; and (3) Microsoft will have to buy back a lot of expensive product.   (By the way the "bait and switch" is that Microsoft told us what the battery life is, which was the product description that we all bought.  After we purchased the product, it was switched -- we don't get what we were told the battery life would be before we bought it.)   

So we appreciate the comment from an only first-named presumed Microsoft person, those of us that reported this issue early on -- both in this forum and by opening a formal service request case during which the issue was identified as "already in our knowledge base as a known issue" -- are skeptical when we hear such non-committal generalities.   

I am a long-time supporter of Microsoft products.  I have an IT background using Microsoft products.  I love the SP4 -- except for the battery drain/heating issue.  So I have no ax to grind here -- I simply want a solution -- yesterday, not maybe in a "future update."  It's embarrassing when I show my iPad friends my SP4 and demonstrate how much better it is than their iPad and when asked about battery life I have to say "Well, it's being worked and maybe Microsoft will have a fix in a future update."

I highly doubt the battery drain will be fixed soon. It's quite disappointing. The updated driver does help eliminate some of the adapter crashes, but that's about it. I was using the September display driver and the drain rate during sleep was about 550 mW per hour. It's triple that with the new driver.