3hr battery life: is battery bad?!

[DocACE911]

Sp3 i7

Screen 25%
Wifi on
Keyboard attChed
No pen
Fresh reboot
Battery care shows -9 to -18 w discharge rate
Fan not running
Browsing, email, word

Getting about 1%
Per minute discharge

Task manager shows 95% cpu time idle

Just started

Ideas?? Is batery defextice?!!

 

[ctitanic]

You are browsing using what browser?

 

[jnjroach]

And, is this a new SP3 (within 72 hours of setup)?

 

[DocACE911]

Yes, had sp3 since August.
First real time traveling with it much.

Broser is just IE. .... Mix of modern and desktop

 

[DocACE911]

How reliable is battery care showing discharge rates? At full charge it says I have max capacity. As soon as I unplug it, battery care estimates (fresh boot) 4 hoirs. This is wifi on, no other programs running. Task man shows nothing (save thrbdamn indexing service that seems to run for sometime)

 

[jnjroach]

So you've had since August, have you run it mains the whole time? If yes, the battery is going to need some calibration...run it down to 10% and plug it in at least once a month. In your case it going to need to cycle a few times...

 

[DocACE911]

Well, it has run dead at least 20 times now since the battery life is so short...

I am trying to figure out anyway there could be some abberrent task running not in task manager? If the capacity on battery care looks good, is the discharge rate of -10 or -18 ok? Litterally it drops 1%/minute just sitting here typing this.

I guess I could just demand a new one... hate to loose all my installs etc and set this thing up all over again how I like it.

 

[jnjroach]

From an elevated CMD Prompt run the following commands:

powercfg /energy

and

powercfg /battery

This will create 2 HTML reports in your System32 directory, copy them to you Documents folder and open in IE and see if any process sticks out, the battery report will show the condition of your battery.

 

[ptrkhh]

Check the App History in Task Manager. Don't forget to activate Options > Show history for all processes.
Now sort by the CPU time usage. Theres a large chance that Windows Modules Installer Worker (TiWorker) takes a lot of juice. If that's so, just wait for a few days and it will calm down.

 

[Dblkk]

Sp3 i7

Screen 25%
Wifi on
Keyboard attChed
No pen
Fresh reboot
Battery care shows -9 to -18 w discharge rate
Fan not running
Browsing, email, word

Getting about 1%
Per minute discharge

Task manager shows 95% cpu time idle

Just started

Ideas?? Is batery defextice?!!

Since you've stated that its a new surface. Within a few days. I believe your battery times are pretty good. When you first get and start using the surface, there are a lot of thing going on in the background. Such as windows is indexing everything, running first time scans, running background updates and things like this. The batteries themselves are still new and haven't had a change to charge discharge a few times, when all this happens and is done. Windows will be set up and ready to go and not need to run in the background, and the battery will know exactly what is fully charged and drained and be able to run it better.

There are several battery life helping/saving forums on this site. A suggest you read through them and get a good idea of what is all available to gain some additional battery.

I have the i5 version 8gb/256, and I get about 5 hours now. But I also have brightness high, and keep a lot of things on instant sync. When I first got it I was getting around 4 hours if that. A week or so later and trying a lot of battery saving things left me with 7 to 8 hours. I ran that way for a few months, but for the most part id prefer to have everything instant synced and have to throw on charger during lunch and run whatever I want, rather than be ok until supper. I use my surface all day everyday. It will either last me to supper if I do everything battery, then I charge it so I can use it until I go to bed/fall asleep. If I run it my way, ill top it off at lunch, and then itll last me until I fall asleep at night.

 

[Haldi]

I have the i5 version 8gb/256, and I get about 5 hours now. But I also have brightness high, and keep a lot of things on instant sync. When I first got it I was getting around 4 hours if that. A week or so later and trying a lot of battery saving things left me with 7 to 8 hours.

i can confirm exactly this!
same tab.
i get around 6-7 hours on low brightness web surfing with FF and about 5-6h on some heavy Excel work.
and it was around 4-5h when i first got it.