Surface Pro 3 battery degradation

When is this going to be fixed? Or, should users that are experiencing this issue attempt to go to a MSFT store for help? My machine is just a couple of months out of warranty but is all but unusable when not using the charger:

I'm not sure this could get worse.

FYI:

Installed batteries

Information about each currently installed battery

BATTERY 1

NAME X898289

Think mines going a bit nuts!

Here’s a quick update to my post a week ago. As I had posted then, I have a Surface Pro 3, i7 with SIMPLO battery. My battery had gradually lost full charge capacity starting in April, and it appears to have reached a low point on 7/18. Since that date, my battery has made a painfully slow recovery. The battery report this morning shows a charge capacity of 21,758 mWh yesterday, compared to 14,748 mWh one week earlier, and 9,794 mWh on 7/18.

(The value of 9,794 mWh on 7/18 is no longer visible in today’s report, but it was visible in last week’s report.)

This morning’s charge is slightly higher still, at 22,838 mWh.

Aside from trying several of the tips posted at several sites to update firmware and reduce battery utilization, the thing I’ve done repeatedly is run down the battery and then recharge it. I have not tried uninstalling and reinstalling the battery driver, nor have I tried running it continuously plugged in for two weeks, as suggested by others in posts on this forum. Also, my system does not show any indication of an update from Microsoft yesterday.

The very first person who posted to this thread, and many others, have posted that they tried battery discharge and recharge as a strategy, and it did not help, while four others besides me have seen their batteries at first degrade and then improve, including one other person who mentioned discharge and recharge as his or her strategy. It appears that there are machine hardware or software differences, or usage differences, which impact the effectiveness of this approach, and there may be alternative approaches that work as well.

The details matter, although it is not clear exactly which details. In my case, once fully charged, I run the battery down as much as possible, usually to under 7%, or even lower when I have the patience to deal with it. (As you can see from the report above, last night I only ran it down to 12%, that was an exception.) Then I plug it in to recharge. When I am able to do so, prior to recharging it, I power the tablet off first, rather than continuing to use it or sending it to sleep or hibernate. Also, if I use my surface pro 3 plugged in and it does not fully charge by the time I am done with it, I power it off to complete the recharge. Powering off is not always possible during the day of course, but I have run it down as much as possible, powered it off, and plugged it in or docked it at night, almost every night for the past couple of weeks, and when I can during the day as well.

At this point, the battery in my Surface Pro 3 charges at just over half of its design capacity, up from less than a quarter two weeks ago, and the daily trend remains positive, with improvements coming frustratingly slowly. Based on the mix of reports on this thread, I would not expect the same approach to help everyone who has been impacted by this issue, but it might help some other Surface Pro 3 owners get better usage out of their tablets, until Microsoft delivers a real fix.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, it is probably the "fuel gauge" IC built into the battery pack that is misprogrammed.  The IC is a tiny computer that controls all the power going into and out of the physical battery cells.  You are right in guessing that the problem is in firmware (for the fuel gauge IC).  The problem is that there is usually no way to get at this firmware since it is all sealed in the battery pack.  The only thing Microsoft can probably do is read registers and data from the fuel gauge IC.

Ever looked at a battery for a phone or computer and wondered why it had more than 2 contacts?  At least 3, sometimes 5 or 6.  An AA battery only has two contacts, plus and minus.  Some of those extra contacts are for communicating with the fuel gauge IC.

I worked for a phone manufacturer and we had a similar problems with a phone many years ago.  Batteries would go dead suddenly, could only be charged up to 49%.  All kinds of weird behavior.  Turned out to be the fuel gauge IC.

My guess is that Microsoft is trying to get Simplo to foot the bill for all the repairs.  But Simplo may not have the resources which is why this is dragging out.  Much like the Takata airbag problem.

Actually, I am guessing the charging circuit with the "smarts" is built into the surface itself, not the battery. These are li-ion or li-poly batteries, which are made up of several cells. With all lithium multi-cell batteries, a good charge circuit needs to "balance" the cells, so it will send more voltage to specific cells to get them all up to the same level, otherwise it can damage the battery. The several contacts you see on the battery are for getting +/- from each discrete cell.

I fly R/C helicopters and planes, and we use large li-poly batteries. Our smart chargers are very advanced and programmed with the specific profiles of every battery chemistry. Also, most these days are firmware-updatable so if a new battery chemistry is added in the future, we can update our chargers to charge them. I have run into some of my older li-poly batteries in the past that my older charger would not charge, as it was programmed to fail out early if it thought the batt was damaged. But my newer charger has a mode which will attempt to charge a battery in a safe mode to get it back into it's normal profile. I have rescued several older packs this way that had discharged lower than they should have.

So what I am getting at is the reason why I think it is quite possible a firmware update can fix the issue. It's possible as you say that the circuit is inside the battery itself, but I am hoping that's not the case. Also hope that the scenario doesn't happen where our machines will not think they are charged to a sufficient degree to even allow us to apply such an update. That would suck royally!

The Surface Pro 3 has a IC:

https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/CB6VkcaZAS4QHJwv.huge

From the teardown of iFixit

(https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Pro+3+Teardown/26595)