Surface Pro 3 battery degradation

Anonymous

I've been using Microsoft Surface Pro 3 for a year, and shortly after the warranty expired I noticed my Surface Pro 3 can only last about 1-2 hours after a full charge. At first I thought this was a problem with background process draining the battery so I disabled everything running in the background. It didn't helped. Then I found out about the powercfg utility and run powercfg /batteryreport on it, and this was the result:

A full charge capacity has degraded by over 80% in just few weeks and continue degrading. I tried to "recalibrate" the battery by doing full charge then full drain multiple times, and it didn't helped. Talk with Microsoft via chat support and they insist this was a software problem and reinstalled the driver and asked me to wait few days to see if things improve. Not only it didn't improved, but now my Surface can only last 30 minutes.

Few days after chat (today), I called Microsoft support and they were being extremely unhelpful. Insist that this was a software problem (which the chat support person already did) and it's "perfectly normal" for battery capacity to degrade. I insist that I've already done the software "fixes" and it didn't work and tell them this is definitely hardware problem, but the person on the phone tell me there's nothing I could do except to order the out of warranty exchange (which cost about $560 in my local currency).

Is there anything else I should do? My country has no Microsoft Store which I could take the machine for them to take a look. Phone/online support were the only option, and none of them could understand the issue.

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Anonymous

Hello everyone,

Thanks for your continued patience here. We have now completed our testing of the update and it has passed our quality assurance process.

The update, “System Firmware Update - 8/29/2016”, is now available to install from Windows Update.

Before installing this update, ensure that your Surface Pro 3 is plugged directly in to AC power using the standard AC power adapter (do not use the Surface Docking Station), disconnect any USB devices or external monitors, and check that Windows shows a 40% charge or greater when you hover over the icon in the taskbar before you begin.

Once you install the update, please select Restart now (do not shutdown). After your Surface restarts, please manually restart it a second time to complete the process. For more information, please see our Surface Pro 3 Battery FAQ article.

If you’re having trouble charging your Surface, you get a low-battery error, or your Surface turns off when you unplug it, the steps in our Surface battery won’t charge article can help you pinpoint the problem. Should you need any further assistance, please contact us.

Thanks again.

Greg

Updated 8/29/16.

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1,459 additional answers

Anonymous

2016-08-29T20:52:32+00:00

Sure?

I also have an LGC battery that reports +44,000 mWh (instead of 42,000 something), gives me only 1.5 hours of regular use, and when showing 10% remaining dies within 3 seconds, too quick to even properly shut down. Recalibrating (fully discharge then fully recharge) does not work, all battery tools report the same. 22 months old.
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Anonymous

2016-08-29T20:53:13+00:00

to me it looks like just the battery level being incorrectly reported.

modern batteries decide themselves what section of the battery to use so would have been cycling different areas for the tiny amount of power that was being requested from the OS, so hopefully all will be ok.
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Anonymous

2016-08-29T21:10:27+00:00

The firmware update fixed things for me... mostly. It got me from 5WHr to 34WHr. Huge huge upgrade. Thank you Mircorosft! I still would like to make it back up to 42WHr, so maybe a few charge/discharge cycles will fix it? Also, it still says I have 556 cycles on the battery, which is impossible...
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Anonymous

2016-08-29T21:15:09+00:00

I went to check for updates immediately after reading a firmware update had been released.

It is indeed available and I installed it, rebooted and that was 40 minutes ago!! So no matter what way you look at it, it beats the 10 mins or less I reported yesterday or the day before.

It was stuck reporting 50 mins left with 100% for a while and I've just checked and now, it is still stuck at 100%, but the remaining time is at 3h17mins remaining.

I'm going to reboot to see if this updates the time as I'm a little bit concern that 10 minutes later, it is still displaying 3h17 and 100% which obviously incorrect and a little bit concerning but it's now over 1h and my SP3 is still running, so it's a great improvement and hopefully, it will be the same for everyone here.
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