Lumia 950 battery drains rapidly

This morning I send my 950 XL to repair, It's not possible to have a day with this phone, battery drain ...

I try to install the last inside os same thing

I try after reinitialised the phone, to desinstall all I can, turn all programs off in backward, turn wifi bluetooth, gps, off

always same thins : 28 % by hour !

I don't know if it's a hardware or os fault, but If MS can't find the way, I want money back !

I'm happy with the battery performance after the reset - I get about 15 - 17 hours before it goes in to battery saver, and that's with fairly constant "puttering" with some fairly crappy apps - Facebook and MSN News/Edge being the big hitters. Even an hour long Skype call over a two-bar cell connection didn't hurt it too badly, which was a surprise.

My numbers are very similar to yours - generally 22% system, 73% screen, 80+ % foreground apps. I think there may be an issue with the display driver for the 950 (at least I hope, so, given those numbers), as it is an OLED display and should be more efficient than an LCD. But my old 920 that I just upgraded to WM10 is flipped the other way on numbers: 75% system, 20% display. And it looks like it will go a couple of days in idle mode (it's just been sitting on my desk since I upgraded it yesterday).

One  thing I did do to the 950 last night is take the screen off of auto-brightness and dimmed it down (just to see if it has any effect on the numbers - auto seemed to keep it too bright, anyway).

I don't do a whole lot of uploads from the phone, but it's never seemed to be much of a problem. If I get a chance I'll try a few and see how long it takes for photos to arrive.

If I have understood the Cellular Data setting correctly, it means that the phone will fall back to cellular if the current WiFi connection has no route to the Internet (i.e. a bad hotspot of some sort) - something I was under the impression that WP8 already did. Thanks for pointing out that this is now a setting in W10, which was disabled for me.

Now, the bad news is that enabling this setting changed nothing, nor did enabling OneDrive to upload over cellular data connections. Uploads are still extremely slow, error prone, and consume battery (relevant to this thread). Back to USB it is.

Since you are now happy (?) with the battery life after the hard reset, has anything in the power usage distribution changed? For me, 60-70% of the power is consumed by the Display, followed by System at 25%. 80-90% consumption is foreground apps, with Edge being the top app with over 50% of the total. These numbers have been fairly stable for me - are they very different from yours?

The funny thing is, by setting it to allow apps to use cellular data, my cellular data usage did not go up, but my wifi connections became completely stable. Before, if I had say 7 apps that needed updating, it would update three or four, and then stop. And I would see things like apps saying "unable to get data right now, are you connected to the Internet" even though it clearly showed 4 bars of wifi up in the status bar. All those issues are gone, but my cellular data usage is just a few MBs.

Your slow OneDrive syncs may be something similar, so that might be worth a try. Change the setting, recycle the phone in and out of airplane mode to reset the wifi, and see if things start moving, and if so, see if your cell data usage goes up. If it does, change the setting back, no harm, no foul. It seems to me on the phone that OneDrive is auto-upload only, and only for photos, so it shouldn't go nuts and chew up your data plan, I think. Also, most of the high-volume system stuff will only happen over wifi (map updates, system updates, etc.). That won't change, but it again does seem like the wifi connection works a lot better if you allow cellular data too.

Anyway, good luck - hope it gets sorted for you, as the phone hardware is fantastic.

:-)

Shubert, you seem to have come to mostly the same conclusions that I have regarding W10. First and foremost I need a working phone, of course, and I assumed L950 would at least provide a better experience than the low-end 5xx Lumias that I have used and quite enjoyed for the last couple of years. At least on paper, the L950 would provide me with a good camera that I have missed many times (wife's got a 1020), and dual SIM meant that I could leave my work iPhone at home. The good news is that image quality is great, and dual SIM works really well for me. However, the constant need to recharge, OneDrive (which I have now disabled), and the many other glitches and regressions in W10 makes owning a L950 quite frustrating right now. I haven't upgraded any of my family's PCs to Win10, solely because of OneDrive, but believed that the experience on a phone wouldn't be as bad as it turned out to be.

If the issue really is that you get into a bad state if you restore from a W8.1 backup but not from a W10, it should be possible push out a fix for this, so I'll wait a little more for an update to materialize. If that doesn't happen in the near future, I promise I'll try a reset and post the results here. :) After all, a hard reset is the miracle cure suggested for almost any ailment that strikes our precious Windows Phones.

So far, allowing more apps to use cellular data has been out of the question, due to OneDrive consuming ungodly amounts of bandwidth (and probably also battery power, so this rant isn't completely off-topic) in order to mostly annoy me. The "new and improved" Data Usage report only displays totals, and not WiFi/cellular separately like in WP8.1, so it's harder to spot the offending app if more can use cellular data in the background. But thanks for the tip - I have noticed some oddities with WiFi as well, such as it becoming completely disabled and requiring a reboot to see any networks again. Oh, and I just had to redo Bluetooth pairing with my car, and so on and so forth... :)

/ David (in a Holiday mood)