Clear up an Issue for me?

[SeanP]

When I first bought my SP3 on release day, one thing I really loved was the battery life.

I never had an issue with that. I would consider myself a moderate user. I do NOT watch videos or play game on it. It's 95% work...Microsoft Office, Outlook, Web surfing via IE (Facebook, Etc), and using some modern Apps, like Evernote, Box, Calendar, etc.

Doing this I was able to get 7.5-8.5 hours on a single charge. I also ran task manager to see what was running to see if some apps were running and when closing them out, they never showed up in task manager and I was able to manage battery life well.

After the last firmware, my SP3 has taken a MAJOR hit with battery life. What was 7.5 hours with my heaviest use is now 4.5 hours or less doing the same tasks, 40% brightness, etc. Same exact usage pattern but 3 less hours AFTER the update.

Has anyone else notice this? Had same issue?

I ran task manager and noticed that apps that I closed normally were still showing in my Task Manager. That's never happened to me before. I just closed it out and it was gone, didn't appear anywhere, but now they still show up there. If I swipe in left to right they are not there but show up in Task Manager...wondering if there's an issue or bug here.

It's so frustrating as I've not had issues until this point. I was going to pull the trigger on almost 30 of these devices for my company but now I do not feel comfortable doing so...

 

[kevinlevrone]

I do have the same problem. I only had the SP3 after the last firmware update (stupidly I installed it at the first Windows update after setting up Windows), but it doesn't last more than 4-4.5 hours whereas my former SP2 has no problem lasting 7 hours or more. I was quite shocked by the much shorter battery life, but luckily at this moment I mostly use it plugged in, but it's not comforting to know that it has this "problem". I exclusively use IE now as my browser and battery life is still around 60% of the SP2 battery life. With Chrome it was even worse.

It's encouraging to find out that there was a point in time when the SP3 had much better battery life, I suppose it will be fixed soon by a new firmware update.

I think that if enough people contact Microsoft Support about this (especially people like you that want to buy many devices) they will probably investigate the issue.

 

[SeanP]

I do have the same problem. I only had the SP3 after the last firmware update, but it doesn't last more than 4-4.5 hours whereas my former SP2 has no problem lasting 7 hours or more. It's encouraging to find out that there was a point in time when the SP3 had much better battery life, I suppose it will be fixed soon by a new firmware update.

I think that if enough people contact Microsoft Support about this (especially people like you that want to buy many devices) they will probably investigate the issue.

I have contacted them. Walked me through a complete wipe of my machine and redo...Didn't solve anything.

 

[SeanP]

Take a look at this screenshot of my event viewer. The error of push notifications had popped up many times. I checked the driver for this, but it's up to date (Marvel Chip I believe)...Thought this might have something to do with it. Wondering how to check if all my drivers are up to date easily? I did last firmware and all others so believe it should not be an issue. Who knows

 

[SeanP]

I run an energy report and took screen shots of the report since I could not post it directly. I am hoping someone can tell me or interpret what is going on here because I don't fully understand what the issues are and how I can resolve them.

Thank you

 

[kevinlevrone]

I suppose the first energy report can be disregarded because there was a process consuming CPU. I also have the "access point does not support power save" on my energy report but it isn't an issue because I used the SP2 with the same router and it worked great.

My energy report is mostly clean and I still have the battery issue.

 

[nipponham]

GoToMeeting program is not playing nice with SP3. Try uninstalling that first to see if your situation improves. Also, run sfc /scannow from an elevated prompt to make sure files are not corrupted. It look likes a dll library may be causing some issues.

 

[Liam2349]

When I first bought my SP3 on release day, one thing I really loved was the battery life.

I never had an issue with that. I would consider myself a moderate user. I do NOT watch videos or play game on it. It's 95% work...Microsoft Office, Outlook, Web surfing via IE (Facebook, Etc), and using some modern Apps, like Evernote, Box, Calendar, etc.

Doing this I was able to get 7.5-8.5 hours on a single charge. I also ran task manager to see what was running to see if some apps were running and when closing them out, they never showed up in task manager and I was able to manage battery life well.

After the last firmware, my SP3 has taken a MAJOR hit with battery life. What was 7.5 hours with my heaviest use is now 4.5 hours or less doing the same tasks, 40% brightness, etc. Same exact usage pattern but 3 less hours AFTER the update.

Has anyone else notice this? Had same issue?

I ran task manager and noticed that apps that I closed normally were still showing in my Task Manager. That's never happened to me before. I just closed it out and it was gone, didn't appear anywhere, but now they still show up there. If I swipe in left to right they are not there but show up in Task Manager...wondering if there's an issue or bug here.

It's so frustrating as I've not had issues until this point. I was going to pull the trigger on almost 30 of these devices for my company but now I do not feel comfortable doing so...

Calibrate your battery.

 

[SeanP]

Calibrate your battery.

Referring to cycling the battery? I have done that already. If something else can you advise?

 

[M.Z. Bahrudin]

this actually has thing to do with win8.1 where you actually need to hold for about 3seconds when dragging the app to the bottom (wait until it flipped) to close the app properly so it will not show up in the task manager. Apparently you can google this app CLOSE THRESHOLD FOR WIN8.1 (i used it) to reduce the waiting time.

 

[Liam2349]

Referring to cycling the battery? I have done that already. If something else can you advise?

Yes, as in running it down completely from 100%. I'd encourage you to try it a couple more times.