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Battery drain normal use and standby?

cbus

New Member
So, I purchased an i7 256 sp3 on Black Friday. I have been using it regularly and am a bit frustrated with battery life.

When I just surf the internet as I am doing now, in 1 hour I lose 12%. In this session, I have been doing no streaming just reading and no other applications running - with this type of loss. Is this normal?

Also, last night I decided to unplug to test. Battery was at 100%. Keyboard was shut. Woke up this morning to a less than 10% battery left asking me to plug in. I know this isn't normal. I checked task manager and chrome and office applications were running in background. Checked device manager and it says when cover shut, go to sleep.

I have read the other threads concerning standby but this is silly. It seems like this should be an easy fix but from reading the other threads, I'm wondering if I should return.

Please help!

Here is my sleep report from last night:

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jnjroach

Administrator
Staff member
What version of Chrome are you using? Chrome has been one of biggest culprits in short battery life....

Also, we have many threads on this subject.... using the search function will get you many hits on possible causes and potential fixes.... Thanks.
 

jnjroach

Administrator
Staff member
So, I purchased an i7 256 sp3 on Black Friday. I have been using it regularly and am a bit frustrated with battery life.

When I just surf the internet as I am doing now, in 1 hour I lose 12%. In this session, I have been doing no streaming just reading and no other applications running - with this type of loss. Is this normal?

Also, last night I decided to unplug to test. Battery was at 100%. Keyboard was shut. Woke up this morning to a less than 10% battery left asking me to plug in. I know this isn't normal. I checked task manager and chrome and office applications were running in background. Checked device manager and it says when cover shut, go to sleep.

I have read the other threads concerning standby but this is silly. It seems like this should be an easy fix but from reading the other threads, I'm wondering if I should return.

Please help!

Here is my sleep report from last night:

View attachment 4876
View attachment 4877
View attachment 4878
Again, look at Chrome, according to the report you video driver is the culprit for the drain which is unusual ....

Also, are all patches and firmware updates applied?
 

zhenya

Active Member
12% loss per hour is a bit over 8 hours of battery life which is pretty much exactly what you should expect from the SP3.

I don't see any information in your sleep report that relates to an overnight period of sleep. You have 4 sleep sessions none longer than 1h20min using 810mW which is a bit high because it spent 0% of its time in low power state. You can see that the later sleep session of 45 minutes it spent 98% of its time in low power mode so it drained almost nothing from the battery.

I have occasionally had my Surface not go to sleep properly - this is most common after I have pulled it off the docking station at the end of the work day, but it happens at other times as well. If it never really goes to sleep, it will drain the battery quickly as happened to you.

Also, as Jeff says, Chrome is a poor browser choice for battery life. Google purposefully hacks the system timer clock in order to make the browser more responsive. This means the processor can never go into its lowest power state for more than 1ms. Be careful because Chrome will also not really 'close' by the default installation settings. You have to close it from the system tray and tell it to really close.
 
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