How is your battery life on the Surface Pro 7?

Anonymous
2020-01-03T19:11:20+00:00

I upgraded to the Surface Pro 7 - 8gb, 256GB from the SP4 8gb, 256GB. My SP4 hardly got an hour of battery and would shut off on battery without warning, so I constantly had it plugged into the wall wherever I went.  I was hoping for much better on the SP7. Currently I am struggling to get a full 5 hours...closer to 4 hours. 

Yes, I know I use Chrome and Edge, a number of Office windows open, might watch some YouTube and Netflix. 

4 to 5 hours seems pathetically small.

Any other comments, suggestions or comparisons? (I know there's a need to 'bed in' a new battery in, I've had the laptop almost 2 weeks now, the battery should be 'bedding' in by now.

thanks in advance

Surface | Surface Pro | Power and battery

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-05-11T23:26:08+00:00

    I get around 5 hours with it and for ME, It's okay. I use it to cloud game (which it does an amazing job of) and just basic web surfing etc.

    However, if I was really using this for productivity for work or in class, I would have returned this. I'd be paranoid of my battery running out during a long work meeting on zoom video etc. or during a long lecture.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-05-11T23:27:15+00:00

    You goto "settings".

    Then "update & security".

    Then "view update history".

    Then "uninstall updates".

    Then located the particular update and uninstall it.

    Not everything from the update will be uninstalled.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-05-12T14:23:50+00:00

    I'm just wondering if I could get a little more juice from it if I ran Linux on top of Windows? Their famous Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

    Anyone has any experience with WSL on a Surface Pro 7?

    I know one of the reasons Mac machines have better battery life is because of their Unix based OS. So I wonder if we could also boost our little Surfaces with some Linux flavor. Should be enough for browsing and Office Work.

    Anyone tried it?

    I don't think WSL (version 1) would do anything to improve battery life as it's just an instance of Linux running on top of Windows. You'd have to replace Windows with Linux (or dual-boot) on your Surface to see a difference in battery life (i.e. run Linux natively on the hardware as the primary OS).  Though I have no idea if it would be better or worse.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-06-06T16:09:46+00:00

    Thank you all for your comments. I went from a SP(2017) i5/8gb to a SP7 i7/16. This is only my second week with the device. There was indeed a noticeable hit to battery life. However, both times I got a new SP5 (one was a warranty replacement; had other warranty replacements but they were short-term) I noticed that the battery life the first few battery cycles was bad. Each time, I drained the battery to well under 10% once, and that seemed to improve things a lot. Went from 5-6 hours to 8+ regularly. That's from nearly three years' experience. I am in the process of doing the same for my SP7. I will let you know if I see an improvement. 

    Other comments on previous comments:

    -I see a huge performance boost when compared to my 2017 model . I would not compare a "4 year old" desktop-class PC with an 15W ultrabook, however advanced. 

    -It is absolutely untrue that the pen digitizer normally craps out after two years. I am a heavy pen user and I would never buy a Surface if that were true. (This is my third.) Warranty replacement with MS has been largely painless. I've gone through that process more than once. 

    -The SP7 can indeed be charged using a battery pack and I second the recommendation to get one. I am (usually) highly mobile, on the train three hours a day and working mobile-y (i.e. not tied to a particular desk) most of the day. I do lots of office (PowerPoint, Excel and Word), lots and lots of PDF markup, lots of work in statistical software, some simple photo manipulation, and plenty of web browsing. Oh and a huge amount of OneNote. I bought a battery pack for my SP(2017) and found I never needed it. I imagine I'll sometimes need it for the SP7 when things return to normal.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-06-06T19:34:27+00:00

    OK, there's definitely a problem.

    I used my SP7 in the late morning off-charger. The battery went down to about 95%.

    I left Wi-Fi on and closed the keyboard cover. Left it for a couple hours at least. 

    I come back and the device is warm and the battery is at 78%.

    I restarted. Then I checked Task Manager. Windows Explorer is closed, yet it's using ~10% CPU.

    I made sure battery saver was on after each time I booted.

    WFT Microsoft.

    UPDATE: OK well now it's back to "normal", which is to say, the thermals issue went away, as did the strangely active Windows Explorer.

    Today I decided to pound the tablet and see what would happen. I started a little after 12:30 (before then I had been docked to record some video). I edited the video from 38 minutes to 25rendered it (granted, at 720p) on battery and that took me to just above 60 percent, at just before 3. Then I spent the afternoon and early evening (with breaks for meals) handling student emails, making a couple exercises, fiddling with my grading Excel spreadsheet, messing around in Stata ... and that lasted me until about a quarter after 8.

    So including the video editing and rendering on my i7 Surface Pro 7, I got nearly 7 hours of intense work done. It feels about as good as my Surface Pro 5 in terms of battery life, except everything is faster. So yeah.

    Granted this is just one day, etc. But it was one hell of a day.

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