Terrible Surface Pro 8 Battery life - Nearly 1% drained per minute

Anonymous
2022-05-02T08:28:47+00:00

I bought a Surface Pro 8 a month ago and since then it has had terrible battery life. I've updated it whenever a new update was available but it's still giving me major issues. I logged in at 7:50am this morning and by 9:24 it had gone from 90% battery (I'm also not sure why 10% drained overnight while in hibernation?) to 37%. For an hour of that time I was on a Teams video call but I'm still seeing significant battery drain during other types of usage so I don't think it's because of Teams but I'm not 100% sure. Other things to note that I don't believe should impact it that much are that I had it on 100% screen brightness during that time because I find the screen disappointing dark (darker than my previous few laptops) and I had the surface keyboard attached and some bluetooth headphones attached to listening in on the Teams meeting.

See the two screenshots below. Can anyone help because the laptop is clearly unusable if I can't use it for more than 2 hours on battery per day. I'm shocked at how bad my first Microsoft product is compared to the years of using Dell, Lenovo and HP with no issues.

I purchased the Surface Pro 8 before leaving Australia and have moved back to Ireland so may have an issue claiming on warranty if I need it fixed?

Surface | Surface Pro | Power and battery

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-08-29T20:09:35+00:00

    I found a number of settings in Edge to try to improve things, disabled as many powerhogging features as I could. Charged the battery to 100%. Watched a 10-minute video on YouTube in Edge: Drained the battery 12%. That's more than 1%/min. Staring at the machine in disbelief with nothing running and it dropped another 1%.

    This is ridiculous, How can Microsoft claim up to 16 hrs??

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-09-08T22:44:18+00:00

    I'm having the same issue. Here's a screenshot of the battery usage. I finished watching a video at 1 AM, closed the lid and left the computer until I needed it again this afternoon. Battery's COMPLETELY drained - while the device is closed!! What's up with that?

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-09-09T18:29:33+00:00

    Same problem here. However, unlike everyone else on here, I use mine for exclusively for anesthesia school, so pretty much just Word, PPT, and internet. I do not watch videos on it or play games. The only extraneous (if you want to consider it that) program that I use on here is Spotify while I am studying. Even with the screen brightness turned down to 40%, I only seem to get about 4 to 5 hours out of it before I need to plug it in. So I am basically using it as a glorified typewriter and radio and am nowhere near 16 hours of battery life.

    I was considering looking into getting the battery changed, even though I bought it brand new less than a year ago. But it sounds like even that may not solve the issue as other people have the same problem.

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-10-05T14:54:15+00:00

    I too have similar problem from day 1 of the purchase; I reported immediately to the seller and Microsoft too. Today is 17th day. I tried whatever said above with the help of the tele-executive of Microsoft Call Centre, but to no avail.

    Rate of discharge is almost 1% per minute of usage. Despite trying hard on available options, I'm yet to find a solution.

    Microsoft Call Centre finally offered for a replacement with refurbished Surface Pro 8; wonder why I paid for a fresh one while I'm getting a refurbished for a fault of Microsoft own product.

    On contrast, I've been using MacBook Air for last 6 years; not even a single complaint on the hardware - not exaggerating.

    Please let me know if there is a way out to improve the battery life without going for the refurbished one. I hate to go for it.

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