Solved SP4 Still Active In Sleep

[robertnd2]

Just ran another sleep test for just about and hour. Lost 24% in 54 min which is pretty much the same battery consumption when I was using the computer browsing. The back of the tablet was a little warm when I picked it up, but the fan wasn't running. The sleep test indicates the following top "offenders" listed below.

Wondering if I need to update graphics drivers??? All of the Microsoft updates have been installed.

Top 5 offenders, ranked by active time
NAME TYPE % ACTIVE TIME ACTIVE TIME
Intel(R) HD Graphics 520 (\_SB.PCI0.GFX0) Fx Device 97% 0:53:01
CPU C0 Time Processor 86% 0:46:55
Marvell AVASTAR Wireless-AC Network Controller Networking 1% 0:00:42
No CS Phase PDC Phase 1% 0:00:23
USB xHCI Compliant Host Controller (\_SB.PCI0.XHC) Fx Device 1% 0:00:17

 

[JordanAT]

Yeah, I closed the typecover last night at 10pm with 49% remaning. Wifi during sleep is off, and I had it set for sleep->hibernate at 240 minutes. This morning at 7am it wouldn't even turn on - when I plugged it in and it finally turned on, it was at 0% battery.

Aside from being infinitely frustrating, that's not good for the new cells.

 

[JordanAT]

Based on some real limited testing, I am losing 20-28% battery life every hour with light web browsing on EDGE. That equates to 3.5-5 hours of total battery life. That's really disappointing. If this turn out to be consistently true, I am going to not feel so great about spending all of the $$ that I did. I already had 2 surface pro3s and did the upgrade anyway.

"Light" web browsing can be a real CPU killer these days, especially in Edge since it has no ad-block. Even Chrome with ad-blocking isn't great. I just tried a click-bait news site (If We Ban Commuters From Doing This, You'll Get Home Faster) and scrolling down the page - doing nothing but passive reading - had both CPU cores at 2.5-2.8GHz and a CPU utilization of 60%. Just letting it sit had it at ~30% and 2.3-2.5GHz. Nothing else was running on the machine; before opening Edge, it was at 3%/0.67-0.8 GHz. Chrome with Adblock was similar but Chrome running through a DNS-filtering box (Pi-Hole), which returns no address for ad servers, had peak use at 25-40% while scrolling, and 3-5%/0.8GHz while sitting without interaction.

That's huge - just the ads on a page in Chrome or Edge are using 30-60% of the entire power of your machine and chewing through battery almost as badly as encoding a Premiere 4k video.

In this case, the problem isn't the computer, it's the ads you're paying to have served to you.

 

[robertnd2]

For now, I have resorted to Gorilla tactics on the sleep issue. I changed everything to go directly into hibernation. The PRO4 boots pretty quick from hibernation, so it is really not much of an inconvenience. I did another sleep test last night after making this change and that got rid of most of the battery loss. This doesn't really address the issue, but until they come up with a fix, that's about the only solution. It seems like it is the Intel Graphics Driver based on the sleep reports. The Reddit forums suggest that it is Windows Hello preventing the computer from going into a sleep/low power state, but I am not going to disable Windows Hello. I like it and it is one of the features that differentiates the device from my Surface Pro3.

Aside form that, I am still I unhappy with the battery life during general use. Hopefully, that will improve as time goes on.

 

[starstreak]

Ok, how quickly does your computer boot up from a cold boot? And how quickly does it reboot from hibernation? If it's about the same, wouldn't it be easier to do a shut down and cold boot?

For now, I have resorted to Gorilla tactics on the sleep issue. I changed everything to go directly into hibernation. The PRO4 boots pretty quick from hibernation, so it is really not much of an inconvenience.

 

[theveterans]

"Light" web browsing can be a real CPU killer these days, especially in Edge since it has no ad-block. Even Chrome with ad-blocking isn't great. I just tried a click-bait news site (If We Ban Commuters From Doing This, You'll Get Home Faster) and scrolling down the page - doing nothing but passive reading - had both CPU cores at 2.5-2.8GHz and a CPU utilization of 60%. Just letting it sit had it at ~30% and 2.3-2.5GHz. Nothing else was running on the machine; before opening Edge, it was at 3%/0.67-0.8 GHz. Chrome with Adblock was similar but Chrome running through a DNS-filtering box (Pi-Hole), which returns no address for ad servers, had peak use at 25-40% while scrolling, and 3-5%/0.8GHz while sitting without interaction.

That's huge - just the ads on a page in Chrome or Edge are using 30-60% of the entire power of your machine and chewing through battery almost as badly as encoding a Premiere 4k video.

In this case, the problem isn't the computer, it's the ads you're paying to have served to you.

This is precisely why I use IE11. It's is using 0% CPU on that website on idle.

 

[robertnd2]

Ok, how quickly does your computer boot up from a cold boot? And how quickly does it reboot from hibernation? If it's about the same, wouldn't it be easier to do a shut down and cold boot?

I am definitely no expert in sleep vs hibernation, but from my layman's reading on it before making the switch, Hibernation is essentially shutting the computer completely off anyway. However, before doing that, it writes all of the information in RAM to a temporary location on the hard drive. When the computer resumes from Hibernation, it then opens everything back up again where you left off. If you just select "shut down" it is not going to reopen your programs and resume where you left off.

I haven't done any comparison of boot times of shut down vs hibernation. They should be pretty similar though. One could argue Hibernation could take slightly longer because it is reopening your previous stateprograms, but I don't think we would even notice the difference.

It is obviously not as fast as true sleep mode, but I am going
to live with the few extra seconds until they fix the sleep bug.​

 

[Philtastic]

Tested battery use last night during sleep while I slept. I went to bed at an ungodly hour of ~4:45 am (wanted to finish some C++ programming that I'm learning) with the battery at 99%. Woke up at 10:00 am and turned it on at 10:20 am to see what the battery was at. It was at 70%, thus, over 5.5 hours, it chewed through 29% of my battery (or 5.3% per hour). I then put it back to sleep and turned it on at 12:38 pm to show it off to some friends and then put it back to sleep at 12:43. It was at 41% at that point, chewing through another 29% battery over 2.5 hours (or 11.6% per hour). I then got home and turned it on at 1:43 pm, and the battery was at 27%, having gone through another 14% battery in 1 hour (14% per hour).

What seems common in the attached battery log is that 1) when it's put to sleep, it instantly wakes up and goes to sleep again, and then wakes up again and goes to sleep (the series of "Connected standby", "Active", "Connected standby", "Active", "Connected standby") and 2) It seems to take just over 2 hours each time to reach the "Suspended" state.

This is ridiculous and completely unacceptable.

 

[robertnd2]

Your sleep report looks different than mine. Are you using the powercfg/sleepstudy command? When you look at the battery "offenders" what is it showing? Mine is flagging the Intel Integrated Graphics. Also, my machine is never entering connected standby, so you are doing somewhat better than me. I am/was losing more battery during sleep than you reported. Ended up switching over to hibernate til they fix it.

 

[Philtastic]

I'm using the powercfg /batteryreport because it's a lot easier to interpret and post about. I tried reading through the sleep study and didn't get much out of it.

 

[robertnd2]

I am a novice at the sleep study report as well, but it does tell you what the "culprits" are for chewing up the battery. I am curious if you run that report whether it tells you it is the Intel Graphics as mine does in every case.

 

[Philtastic]

I am a novice at the sleep study report as well, but it does tell you what the "culprits" are for chewing up the battery. I am curious if you run that report whether it tells you it is the Intel Graphics as mine does in every case.

If I'm reading this right, the "WP WiFi Background Scanning Client" is the biggest offender, having been active for 53 minutes (?) and accounting for 55% of usage during sleep.