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

I noticed this morning that my SP4 was very warm (fan running) while charging overnight. Later this day, I also noticed that it heats up while sleeping. In addition, the battery drains very fast while sleeping. This afternoon, it was sleeping for an hour and a half, and it lost 20% of battery life over that time. For kicks and giggles, I checked my SP3 (i3/4GB/64GB). It lost 22% of its charge in 47 hours of sleep state.

To make sense of this, I ran a sleepstudy (powercfg /sleepstudy), which shows very interesting results. One thing I noticed is that the CPU never enters low-power state during sleep. It runs at c0. That is to say that it isn't actually asleep: just that the screen is blank. It's actually running at full throttle. During the 9 hour overnight charge, the Intel 520 driver consumed 92% of CPU cycles. I have another hour-long sleep state this afternoon that shows the same thing. Not that it matters: even when no processes are particularly active (1%), the CPU never enters low-power state. Never.

I would ask other users to do a sleepstudy (your SP4 has actually been logging the data since you first turned it on, the command just makes the device print the results out. Takes less than a second) to see if they find any odd results of this kind.

In fact, what the sleep-study shows is that the battery drains _faster_ during sleep than while in use. This is an absurd situation. For reference, this is an i5/8GB/256GB and it is fully updated. I actually performed a reset just now to see whether any of the software installed (Adobe CC, Visual Studio, and Office 2016) is to blame. I should not that I did have Hyper-V disabled, so that was not the problem.

I have to say, while the machine is gorgeous, and the screen is gorgeous, and it's fast and I really love it, I do also have the screen issue with Edge, the graphics driver crashes, and the WiFi resets. This is not good. We're on the fourth iteration, this should not be a beta test at 1299 dollars a pop.

To put it simply, sleep doesn't work yet (yes, I have all updates manually installed).  You can see what your surface was doing during sleep by running "powercfg /sleepstudy" from the command line with admin privileges.  The report will tell you that your cpu is running full blast while sleeping.

Go into your power settings and change the behaviors for lid close, power button click, etc... to hibernate.  IME, hibernate vs sleep on the surface is about 3 second difference in start up time.  You'll have little to no battery drain after that.

Through lots of trial and error, I think I found the problem. It's Windows Hello. Turn it on: get 5 hrs of connected standby. Turn it off: get 87 hrs of connected standby. You can turn it off by using the 'remove' option in the control panel. _Make sure to restart your machine after turning Hello off!_

Take a gander:

Nice catch!