4-5 hours battery life...?

[eee]

Hey there, I recently returned a Surface Pro 1 and bought a Pro 2 instead. To my surprise, the SP2 has only marginally better battery life. I'm wondering if there's something wrong with my device as Anandtech has reported over 8 hours of battery life after the new firmware?

Most of the time I've just been in Chrome, browsing and listening to music. I use a bluetooth keyboard and have tried turning off BT but that still yields less than 30min more battery life. I run the standard 'balanced' performane profile and both the Windows battery meter and BatteryBar report about 4.5hrs of battery life, which seems to be more or less true as I've run it down a couple of times.
I'm now running the battery saving profile and BatteryBar now estimates 5:55 hrs of battery life.

I ran Windows Update on the 28th of December so I don't have the faulty firmware. I looked it up and it's installed the firmware update from the 24th of October so I should have the battery life fix installed... What gives?
I have seen several people report 7-8 hours of browsing or light work battery life and I'm nowhere near that.

 

[girarcat]

hey! My SP2's battery lasts about 5-6 hours with the balanced performance profile, Bluetooth Off, and brightness at 75% approx browsing the internet, some Pdf reading and some OneNote.

I also expected a better battery life, but I guess those 8 hours are achieved with brightness at minimum, battery saving profile, and little multitasking.

 

[mtalinm]

I get 7-8 hours of Office work with wireless on, as long as I'm on the Power Saver profile (with CPU maxed at 50%) and brightness at 30-40%.

 

[Ruffles]

Your problem is that your in Chrome which is a desktop app. When you are on the desktop, it takes more power to run the desktop compositing engine. Full screen video and metro apps don't need this so the video hardware is able to save power. You also have to look at background apps. I also used to run battery bar but found that it constantly polls the system to gather battery stats which eats battery. After removing battery bar, drop box, and HDDLed, I noticed a significant improvement. I now get 6.5-7 hours easy.

 

[eee]

Your problem is that your in Chrome which is a desktop app. When you are on the desktop, it takes more power to run the desktop compositing engine. Full screen video and metro apps don't need this so the video hardware is able to save power. You also have to look at background apps. I also used to run battery bar but found that it constantly polls the system to gather battery stats which eats battery. After removing battery bar, drop box, and HDDLed, I noticed a significant improvement. I now get 6.5-7 hours easy.

Well yeah, I've been thinking about running chrome in metro once it stable version gets updated. However, these benchmarks have been run in desktop mode as far as I can tell, and the discrepancy is huge between our results.

I was actually runnin three cloud services in the background, GDrive, Dropbox and Weiyun. I turned them off and ran on battery. After that cycle, BatteryBar estimates 6:48 runtime. I'll try it today again. Will probably remove all but GDrive from autostart.

 

[jollywombat]

Well yeah, I've been thinking about running chrome in metro once it stable version gets updated. However, these benchmarks have been run in desktop mode as far as I can tell, and the discrepancy is huge between our results.

I was actually runnin three cloud services in the background, GDrive, Dropbox and Weiyun. I turned them off and ran on battery. After that cycle, BatteryBar estimates 6:48 runtime. I'll try it today again. Will probably remove all but GDrive from autostart.

I found dropbox to be a huge cause for battery drain. When it is active I get about 1 1/2 hours less battery even though during this time no files are being modified or transferred within dropbox. Its heartbeat frequency must be constant to cause so much use of network and resources. That sadly was the nail in the coffin for dropbox for me since pretty much every other cloud service out there is cheaper by far, not to mention 200gb from skydrive free with the surface.

 

[eee]

I found dropbox to be a huge cause for battery drain. When it is active I get about 1 1/2 hours less battery even though during this time no files are being modified or transferred within dropbox. Its heartbeat frequency must be constant to cause so much use of network and resources. That sadly was the nail in the coffin for dropbox for me since pretty much every other cloud service out there is cheaper by far, not to mention 200gb from skydrive free with the surface.

Hey there, that's great that you've narrowed it down to Dopbox as the culprit. I removed it from autostart now. I only use it to sync photos from my phone nowdays anyway, and SkyDrive and GDrive for real work. I agree that Dropbox seems rather "dead" compared to the previously mentioned as it is more expensive and offer no ecosystem or extra benefits. And Weiyun gives you 10TB of free storage.
I'll keep running GDrive and see what its battery hit is.