Surface Pro 3 battery degradation

Anonymous
2016-05-11T07:37:37+00:00

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.

Surface | Surface Pro | Power and battery

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Anonymous
2016-07-26T21:31:16+00:00

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. Anonymous
    2016-08-30T12:53:48+00:00

    Did you post the output of your batteryreport here or in a different/new thread?

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-08-30T13:59:54+00:00

    It's going to be really hard to evaluate LGC variations/issues inside this

    existing thread, and it would be easier to escalate if there was a separate

    thread.

    Definitely agree that if this persists a new topic is the way to go which will make it easier for MS to review plus far easier for new posters to follow especially as there is a lot of heated debate within this current topic.

    Cleaner to start a new topic but would be nice to have confirmation from MS that the LGC issue is indeed separate.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-08-30T14:29:23+00:00

    Very interesting, because they have the same capacity as you. I think I set the battery degradation. Microsoft did not want to give us the full capacity of the battery.

    Does anyone really believe these conspiracy theories?  Why would Microsoft do such a thing?

    I have a big issue with how this #BatteryGate incident was handled by Microsoft in terms of the length of time to provide a fix and the lack of information flowing from them.  I do not believe for one minute that Microsoft intentionally caused the software fault in an attempt to sell new hardware.  The damage done to the Surface brand over this will take months, maybe years, to recover with many business people posting in these pages how they have stopped purchasing Surface devices for their employees.

    Microsoft is a business and any practice of building in obsolescence can only ever be counter productive to their business goals.  The SP3 I have is a business purchase and believe me it will be a while before I make another Surface purchase but it isn't because I feel they did this deliberately.

    Why are you considering it a conspiracy, when it's just a decision? Many have reported the exact same charge capacity after the upgrade. This could be Microsoft, hard coding a minimum charge capacity as part of the fix to get the batteries to charge, as the minimum 144 mWh value would effectively mean the device would consider the battery charged within seconds. By hard coding a value below design, but well above 144 mWh, the device can consider the battery not fully charged when below, approximately, 34 Wh and continue to charge the battery.

    It seems to me, the bug was an algorithm that calculated the charge capacity value, then only charged the battery when below that value, but the threshold for that charge capacity kept falling because the algorithm had a cascading error within it, which meant the calculated capacity would always be lower than the last time.

    Hard coding a minimum value of 34 Wh, means the battery would charge to at least that level. This seems like an interim measure, because some batteries might not fully charge to 42 Wh and some degraded batteries that can no longer reach 34 Wh would be charging all the time (Some time in the future though).

    Once the algorithm is fixed properly, I suspect the hard coded base value will be removed.

    It's not a conspiracy, it's a temporary patch to get the devices up and running again!

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-08-30T15:07:55+00:00

    Got a reply from MS:

    ' 

    That’s definitely a different problem from what we saw with the Simplo batteries.  I’ll send it back up to the engineering team.

    '

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