What should "sleepstudy" show for a Surface Pro 3

Anonymous
2014-07-02T16:59:58+00:00

I'm interested to know what other users tend to see when running the "powercfg /sleepstudy" tool on their Surface Pro 3s (as per http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/windowsexperience/archive/2014/06/26/sleep-study-diagnose-what-s-draining-your-battery-while-the-system-sleeps.aspx).

I'm finding that all my "InstantGo" sessions have a drain rate of between 1200 and 2200mW, which can correspond to between 10% and 20% of the battery drain in the 4 hours before the machine hibernates.  

Looking at the culprits, almost all the sessions show the following device running for the entire "sleep" period:

USB xHCI Compliant Host Controller (\_SB.PCI0.XHC) Fx Device 100% 4:00:00

Is this expected?  FWIW, I tend to leave the keyboard cover connected during sleep.

Sometimes (when the drain is at the high end of the range), I also see the following:

Intel(R) HD Graphics Family (\_SB.PCI0.GFX0) Fx Device 100% 4:00:00

Interestingly, during the first few days I had the SP3, the graphics driver was appearing in every session of the sleep study report.  More recently, though, it has stopped appearing.  Recently I've been leaving the Surface at the start screen rather than the Desktop, so this may be related - is there a recommendation about coming out of the Desktop before going to "sleep"

I also never see anything in the "DRIPS histogram" - should I?

What are other people seeing?

On a related note, does anyone know if there is a way of changing the time before the machine hibernates?  For me, 2 hours (or even 1 hour) would probably be fine - if I'm actively going from one office to another, then the "instant" resume is great, but if I'm at home, leaving the machine for a while, then 4 hours is overkill.

Surface | Surface Pro | Power and battery

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-11-20T09:32:30+00:00

    It seems it is fixed - in three connected standby tries, having Skype running did not cause the familiar red xHCI hub in sleepstudy.

    That's good news...

    Now if we only knew how Skype had fixed it, then the people who write my VoIP softclient (which causes the same behaviour) could make the same fix!  [Full disclosure, the VoIP client is actually written by my company, so I'm in a good place to get them to fix it, if I knew what the fix was!]

    My Skype is still at 6.21.0.104 and says its the latest - how did you get an updated version?

    Ed

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-11-20T05:23:39+00:00

    It seems it is fixed - in three connected standby tries, having Skype running did not cause the familiar red xHCI hub in sleepstudy.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-11-20T03:54:41+00:00

    I need to check it more, but after the latest skype update (6.22.81.105), I let it run and put my Surface Pro 3 to sleep. For this one time connected stanby (for about 3 hours), I did not find usual red thing in sleepstudy with Skype. So hopefully they fixed this with this update.

    Obviously I have to check it more to be sure - I put the machine to a couple of short sleeps but for some reason powercfg /sleepstudy is not showing the data for those two sleeps ...

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-11-12T13:28:37+00:00

    Are any of you running Cisco AnyConnect?  We see huge battery drains when AnyConnect is installed where after an overnight sleep session, there will be like 35% battery remaining.  When it's not installed we still see the battery drain down to about 75%.  This is better, but not as good as the retail install on Win8.1 on the SP3.  I too was just given the powercfg settings noted above to try as the retail SP3 goes into hibernate after x amount of time (probably 4 hours).  We are not setting these settings in our Enterprise image (yet).

    I can confirm that I also have Cisco AnyConnect installed and I am experiencing a huge battery drain while the SP3 is in Connected Standby / Instant go. Something like 10% per hour before it goes into a deeper standby. Unfortunately I cannot run "powercfg /sleepstudy" to identify the process as I get an "Unexpected Error". This problem seems to be occurring especially with German language versions of the Surface Pro 3. I have no idea why. There is a workaround available (https://helgeklein.com/blog/2014/03/workaround-unexpected-error-powercfg-sleepstudy/ ) but it doesn't solve it for me. Therefore all I can do is look if other people have similar battery drain experiences, see what processes might cause it for them and cross check with my software setup.

    From searching the web I also found that virtual network adapters such as those from VMware, VirtualBox etc. might not be compatible with Connected Standby / Instant Go and are potential trouble makers. If anybody uses this software, it would be great if someone could check if that's an issue.

    I also contacted Microsoft support. They seemed to be little aware of this problem and recommended to check if a battery drain is also occurring when the TyperCover is not connected to the SP3. The other options they offered me was a complete system reset or changing the entire SP3...

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  5. Anonymous
    2014-11-02T06:44:53+00:00

    I had very similar problem as those discussed in this thread. Additionally, I had problems with my Bluetooth mouse loosing connection after sleep or hibernate modes. I recently installed the 10/28/14 firmware update and so far it seems to fix most of the issues with my SP3 I7.  During sleep the current drain is now 631mW and I lose 6% during 4 hours of sleep

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