Surface Pro 3 short battery life

Well, I have been running the tablet today, all day, on battery.  I was going to display the powercfg report but the tablet keeps coming up with an error and generates a blank report.

However, that is okay!  Never trust a utility to diagnose itself.  I used a stopwatch instead and did a real time tracking of the power usage.

Right now, the machine is at 33% battery level and watched two movies, did two local government reports, browsed the Internet (in fact, I am on it right now - on battery) and most of the time has been online.

My stopwatch is still going but is displaying 6:12:20:32

Like I said, I still have 32% on the battery meter.

My machine is configured with default settings, power plan is balanced with sleep mode OFF when on A/C.  I have the screen at 100% brightness (I did get a message regarding I can get more time by adjusting it) and along with Internet, I also printed 2 sets of reports wirelessly.

I am going to go ahead an end the tracking now, but this machine is definitely "a keeper"!  The most I ever got out of a laptop was barely over 4 hours and that was a low end AMD CPU.

So, I would say consistent 6.5 hours minimum on a single charge for the i3 model.  That is what I got twice before.

Watching video is not exactly a Battery saving task. So 6.5 is not bad at all.

Well, I have been running the tablet today, all day, on battery.  I was going to display the powercfg report but the tablet keeps coming up with an error and generates a blank report.

However, that is okay!  Never trust a utility to diagnose itself.  I used a stopwatch instead and did a real time tracking of the power usage.

Right now, the machine is at 33% battery level and watched two movies, did two local government reports, browsed the Internet (in fact, I am on it right now - on battery) and most of the time has been online.

My stopwatch is still going but is displaying 6:12:20:32

Like I said, I still have 32% on the battery meter.

My machine is configured with default settings, power plan is balanced with sleep mode OFF when on A/C.  I have the screen at 100% brightness (I did get a message regarding I can get more time by adjusting it) and along with Internet, I also printed 2 sets of reports wirelessly.

I am going to go ahead an end the tracking now, but this machine is definitely "a keeper"!  The most I ever got out of a laptop was barely over 4 hours and that was a low end AMD CPU.

So, I would say consistent 6.5 hours minimum on a single charge for the i3 model.  That is what I got twice before.

If you still have 30% after 6 hours that means easily 8 hours.

No, the battery drains at a faster rate after 50%.  At first, I thought 10 hours because I checked the gauge when it reached 90% and the stopwatch was at 58 minutes, 6 seconds.  But the drain rate actually increases after that.

Right after I wrote the post, it had already dropped to 30% even.  Three percent drop in a few minutes.  If I kept it running, it should have lasted just to the 6.5 hour mark before shutting down.

I am not going to complain and the machine can be tweaked to increase it longer.  That test was everything running and screen brightness at 100%.  I set the tablet up just as what a normal person would do "out of the box" use.  The only exception was shutting off sleep mode when on A/C.

So, if you shut off Bluetooth, and dropped the screen brightness to about 30 - 35% and go Airplane Mode when not on the Internet, 8 hours could be reached.

Won't get 9 hours out of it, though.

No, the battery drains at a faster rate after 50%.  At first, I thought 10 hours because I checked the gauge when it reached 90% and the stopwatch was at 58 minutes, 6 seconds.  But the drain rate actually increases after that.

Right after I wrote the post, it had already dropped to 30% even.  Three percent drop in a few minutes.  If I kept it running, it should have lasted just to the 6.5 hour mark before shutting down.

I am not going to complain and the machine can be tweaked to increase it longer.  That test was everything running and screen brightness at 100%.  I set the tablet up just as what a normal person would do "out of the box" use.  The only exception was shutting off sleep mode when on A/C.

So, if you shut off Bluetooth, and dropped the screen brightness to about 30 - 35% and go Airplane Mode when not on the Internet, 8 hours could be reached.

Won't get 9 hours out of it, though.

You will be really surprised to see the difference if you run the same test at 30% of brightness. I bet that you can get more than 8 hours no touching anything else.

Probably, but I can tell you that looking at that slab of aluminum and glass for six hours was long enough.

Also, the fan never kicked in except when I printed a file via Adobe Acrobat Reader.  It was a graphic intensive file and only two pages long.  Has not happened before and only lasted about a minute.

Whatever is going on with the i5 and i7 has got to be the video subset of the CPU.  Intel can't make software and really seemed to have blown it with the "Haswell" series.  I have the desktop i5 (4200U) and it never did install the last video driver update that came across and I wiped the machine out and is running Linux now and have no problem with it.

So, I think the video standards of Windows 8 and the "Haswell" chips are not doing well.

With that thought, I do believe that Intel has a forthcoming update for the series coming out soon.  Supposed to increase efficiency around 30% and that will effect power consumption in the tablet series.  If so, then the owners of the i5 and i7 may see an improvement and the fan may stay quiet in graphics intensive applications.  Doesn't happen on all o them, just some of them.

For me the machine is running just the right amount of time for function and enough spare time as well on battery.  A lot longer than a laptop.