Surface Book Battery Life - what are you getting

Anonymous
2015-10-28T18:44:45+00:00

Hi everyone,

I am not doing anything to intensive with my Surface Book.  Web, email, onenote, outlook.  I am not getting anything near 12 hours of battery life and 4 if i am lucky.

Right now it says I have 33% battery life and have an 1 hour and 26 minutes remaining??

What are you getting?

Surface | Surface Book | Power and battery

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-01-24T16:57:41+00:00

    I'm running at 75% brightness, battery saver is not on. I've been on battery for 5.5 hours now watching videos and surfing the web. Took one break where my surface book went to sleep (set to sleep after 30 minutes) but I was only way for just over 30 minutes so it wasn't sleeping long.

    I'm showing 28% (battery #1) and 19% (battery #2) with a calculated remaining time of 1 hour and 51 minutes.

    I haven't had my battery fail on me yet but I've never needed it for much longer than 5 hours between being connected anyway. I usually have it on a docking station all day at work and then use it on battery when at home. I only end up plugging it in at home on weekends with the way I use it so I've been very happy.

    Update: at 6 hours the battery saver kicked in. Saying I have 54 minutes left now so I burned 1 hour of calculated time in 30 minutes. My screen is still at 75%.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-01-25T18:27:50+00:00

    Such a shame. I have my screen brightness at 53% and battery saver on, getting about same as you. 4-5 hrs. I need to actually TIME it because I haven't done that. How does everyone else gauge what they are getting? You seriously can't trust what the battery icon reports because the time remaining changes with each thing you do.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-01-25T18:34:39+00:00

    As far as Clipboard goes, I get around 1-2 hours, that's with brightness at 50% and battery saver on, only running Fresh Paint and Mail, plus a few Edge pages open. Is this typical?

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-01-25T18:53:10+00:00

    I get my most realistic timing when I'm posted up at a coffee shop for a while. I get a consistent projection of maybe 6-7 hours if I'm using it heavily (Chrome, streaming music, graphics programs). When I'm down to 75% I'll just multiply the time I've been there by 4, then at 50% double the time I've been there, etc. 

    BBold, I usually get a minimum of 2 hours on just the clipboard (i7/16GB) so long as I have my brightness around 50% and battery saver on, and Chrome closed. I constantly check task manager to see what's using the most CPU. 

    A useful note is that one time at the coffee shop Word froze up when I woke from hibernate and then an hour in I realized my battery was blazing toward zero. I couldn't hear that my fan was on and eventually I only got about 3 hours from the full laptop and I was pretty angry. Later I figured out that "Windows error handler" or something had been using 30% of my CPU that whole time, probably due to it getting hung up with the Word crash. Once I ended the process in Task Manager the fan immediately shut off. 

    If I manage to keep my fan from turning on the whole time and am careful about what's on, I can stretch it to maybe 9 hours? Curiously, it seems like I get more total battery life if I use up the clipboard battery while it's separated and then use the keyboard battery in normal laptop mode. Alongside the sleep issue, it feels like the clipboard-keyboard connection is an extra battery drain for whatever reason.

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-01-25T18:59:30+00:00

    Also BB, I would keep Edge closed whenever possible. The browsers use enough of your CPU to make your fan turn on, especially on content-rich pages and those that auto-refresh. The SB opens programs so fast that you might as well close them if you aren't using them and they can save your tabs.

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