Battery Life on Surface 3

[kristalsoldier]

Hi...

I use my Surface 3 purely as a tablet. As such, I have found that aside from the UX issues, the S3 on W10 is worse for the wear on battery, which is a disappointment.

And, please...this idea of turning off some of the services is not really a good idea where I am concerned because some of those services are what makes the tablet indispensable to me.

Anyways, I would be interested in knowing what your experiences are with the battery life of your S3 on W10.

Thanks in advance.

 

[GreyFox7]

Haven't done it yet, but when I do battery life will be on my list for scrutiny.
I will say ever since I reinstalled my wireless driver in 8.1 the battery life improved... so if you're having any wireless hesitations or unexplained general pauses give it a try. I've heard the audio driver under 10 has been acting up also, another candidate for reinstalling. Tagline: It just needs to be slammed on the ground to work.

 

[kristalsoldier]

Haven't done it yet, but when I do battery life will be on my list for scrutiny.
I will say ever since I reinstalled my wireless driver in 8.1 the battery life improved... so if you're having any wireless hesitations or unexplained general pauses give it a try. I've heard the audio driver under 10 has been acting up also, another candidate for reinstalling. Tagline: It just needs to be slammed on the ground to work.

Well...no, I have not experienced any issues with either the wireless or the audio drivers. I don't really know what is going on. What I find is that the desktop mode (on SP3) is fantastic, but tablet mode on the S3 sucks!!! I do hope MS does something and quickly - not bloody well in Oct!!!!!

 

[hughlle]

My S3 is used in the same manner. My battery life seems just fine (unless I forget to change the settings allowing it to go to sleep when I get out of the bath ). I'll see if I can get around to monitoring it and giving you some actual figures.

 

[kristalsoldier]

My S3 is used in the same manner. My battery life seems just fine (unless I forget to change the settings allowing it to go to sleep when I get out of the bath ). I'll see if I can get around to monitoring it and giving you some actual figures.

Hey...if you don't mind my asking - how do you use your S3? I mean what kind of apps do you use?

 

[hughlle]

Hey...if you don't mind my asking - how do you use your S3? I mean what kind of apps do you use?

edge and VLC. I use it for couch surfing, and for audio books/videos in bed. It will be used with onenote come September though. Sure it is overkill for my needs (especially as I have a nexus 7 and 10 for those purposes) but it was free because i'm poor, so why not

Unlike my SP3, this only gets used from 6pm onwards (and spend my spare time as a full time chef so more often than not it's only for an hour before bed in the evening) so have never had an occasion to see what the entire battery can do for me.

 

[theveterans]

Edge is the culprit! Use desktop IE without addons (to simulate MetroIE) and add an hour of battery life use to your S3.

For more details see here:

http://www.surfaceforums.net/threads/windows-10-not-impressed.16213/page-3

After switching to Desktop IE without addons, my battery life is now the same as 8.1

 

[jnjroach]

Kristal... please run the powercfg -energy and powercfg -batteryreport

 

[hughlle]

Edge is the culprit! Use desktop IE without addons (to simulate MetroIE) and add an hour of battery life use to your S3.

For more details see here:

http://www.surfaceforums.net/threads/windows-10-not-impressed.16213/page-3

After switching to Desktop IE without addons, my battery life is now the same as 8.1

It would be a little more prudent (remove your emotions from the equation..) to suggest people check to see what edge is doing, not just tell them it will be doing it. Many of us have no issue with Edge and resources. I'm sat here browsing and edge is using 1.4% cpu usage.

 

[kristalsoldier]

Kristal... please run the powercfg -energy and powercfg -batteryreport

Thanks will do as soon as i am back at my desk and will report back.

 

[pnd41s]

I have had battery issues since I purchased my Surface 3 running on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Average time is about 5-6hrs

Ran sleep study and found Marvell AVASTAR Wireless-AC Network Controller was the culprit along with Windows Update.
Also the microSD seemed to be causing some problems since I reformatted it to NTFS and had all my cloud services, drive and dropbox sync to the microsd ontop of my local documents, music, pictures, and videos

I would go through rolling back the driver and updating it again before the issue appears again . I has also disabled wakeup via keyboard, wifi during sleep, turning off Bluetooth to save some more power. All of these seems to have helped with battery performance barely along with how slow it charges via microUSB.

Hopefully MS releases some updates to improve the performance and match their advertised 10hrs.

 

[theveterans]

WiFi adapter is needed to be awake when tablet is in connected standby in order to receive updates from Metro apps during connected standby. To match the 10 hours of Web browsing, you need to do two things: one is to use either Microsoft Edge browser with a host file modification which reduces CPU and RAM usage drastically when using Microsoft Edge. The second one is to use Internet Explorer desktop with TPL for the same effect! Doing this should give you 8-10 hours of Web browsing (not including background music playback from WMP which takes away battery life)