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
    2016-01-26T15:34:18+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. 

    MS Lied about this product.  There is the start of a Class Action lawsuit against MS on this product specifically. 

    Their battery life "estimates" are between 4-5 hours short.  The hardware fails over and over again.  And you can see they have willfully neglected getting this taken care of.

    It's my belief this is not software related.  All the issues are hardware related. And unless they are going to recall every SB and send better updated machines, they won't sell even a FRACTION of the already small amount of these machines they did the 1st time around. 

    Epic fail.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-01-27T00:16:32+00:00

    I'm giving MS until end of week to post a fix, if none is posted, I'll be returning this. ;/

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-01-27T04:12:23+00:00

    As an update for you BBold:

    First, I've never gotten great battery life, and I have the sleep problem, so my unit is not some miracle exception.

    Today at the coffee shop coming off a fresh reboot I only opened Drawboard PDF, Outlook, mysms texting app, and OneNote, and detached at 100% on both. The battery drained linearly and I was at 24% of the CLIPBOARD after 3 hours flat. This is the best I've ever gotten, and seems it lived up to the billing by MS. I think the key is that my fan never turned on, especially since I never opened a browser. I had WiFi ON, location off, bluetooth on, power saver on, brightness 50%. CPU was typically operating at 4-9%, RAM at ~4 GB. I was basically just reading and annotating a PDF with the Pen the whole time. 

    When I re-attached, my keyboard was still at 100% and the calculated total battery was 80%. This makes sense since 1/4 of the battery was at 1/4 capacity (screen), and 3/4 of the battery (keyboard) was at 100%. So if you projected this out (multiply by 5) I could theoretically get 15 hours total at this drain rate. 

    Now, in practice in full laptop work mode, I tend to get 6-7 hours, or ~4-5 if I don't hold back. So I think that:

    1. The clipboard will drain much more slowly when detached due to the inherent connection power leakage (hopefully they fix)
    2. The battery really is capable of the 12 hour performance but with very limited actual function. The professional reviewers got 12 hours but they only had one video player program open with no other interaction. 
    3. The real key is to keep the fan off by keeping the CPU usage low. 

    I would encourage you to try the actual simple video playing drain test, or else the limited programs open detached like I did to see if your unit is actually defective or if it's just a case of MS stating the "best case scenario" battery life and misleading us, which you may or may not want to deal with.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-01-27T04:55:07+00:00

    Then I get home and plug in and attach and open Chrome with 4 tabs, with one streaming a video on Facebook. CPU usage jumps from ~5% to 20% and fan kicks on within a few minutes. 

    I think the real shame of the battery life problem is just that the new Intel chip overheats so easily, or triggers the fan so easily.

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-01-27T06:33:44+00:00

    You know what? If I have to watch every little program I open and sit there and be completely 100% conscious of every thing that is open when detatched, I don't want this. Period. We shouldn't have to jump through hoops and rings of fire just to get 3 hours of battery life on a tablet. Sorry, just my opinion.

    Still awaiting the fix that was supposed to come, allegedly, today. Today is over. No statement from Microsoft.

    I love my SB, but I won't impair it to the point of not being able to use it to its full potential.

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