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

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:

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.

Yes, my Pro 4 i5/256 can get quite hot while asleep. After a few days it seemed to calm down and would sleep overnight on the living room couch and use less than 10% battery. It still can't decide to behave itself all the time. My simple snooping showed a lot of indexing going on at first - I'm not sure what it's doing some other times. I do have Hello enabled now. It wasn't at first when the sleeping disorder was even worse.

Here's hoping the Microsoft engineers figure this out soon. For me it's just annoying. I imagine others are really upset.

Nice catch!