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I performed a battery test

girarcat

Member
Hi! I've just performed a battery test with my SP2 to check how long it lasted.
I disabled Dropbox, 'cause it is supposed to consume a lot of power. I also configured the tablet so that it neither went to sleep nor turned the screen off. I left screen brightness at 55-60% (autobrightness on).
I've spent the whole afternoon with the Surface on, doing light work with OneNote and Internet Explorer (both the Modern UI versions). Most of the time I didn't even touch the computer, I kept it with the screen on and every few minutes I just loaded another website or wrote some sentence on OneNote.

My battery has lasted exactly 7 hours. When I had been using it for 6h40min, the first low battery warning appeared. 10 min later a second warning appeared and 10 min later it went to hibernation mode automatically, with still 6% of the battery remaining.

What do you reckon about the result? Is it within the average or it should last longer?

Thanks!

PD: Type 2 backlight was also disabled.
 
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7 hours is in line, I believe the stated range is 7 to 9 hours, inking does use quite a bit of CPU, much more than typing. Also keeping the computer on even without touching it all of the background tasks will run, A/V, Indexing, SSD Maintenance, etc.
 
Thanks for your answer!
I forgot to say that Type 2 backlight had been disabled.

I think with my normal useage it lasts about 5-6h, reading Pdf documents and surfing the internet (brightness at 80%), though I'm not sure of that because I never keep it with the screen on the whole afternoon, I always use it for a while, then I make it go to sleeping mode, then I use it again... so it's quite difficult to know exactly how many hours it has been doing real work.

By the way, I think there's a way to configure the Surface to go to hibernation mode when the battery is lower than 7%, so I could increase the battery life a few minutes more. Could it damage the computer somehow?
 
You can adjust those settings in the Advanced Settings in the Power Management Control Panel, setting the Critical Power Settings.
 
You can adjust those settings in the Advanced Settings in the Power Management Control Panel, setting the Critical Power Settings.

What I mean is if setting the computer to go to hivernation mode when battery is at 2% could damage the computer or something?

thanks!
 
What I mean is if setting the computer to go to hivernation mode when battery is at 2% could damage the computer or something?

thanks!

It wont "damage" the computer but it might harm the battery a bit since batteries detoriate the fastest when they are fully discharged or when they are fully charged to 100%
Both cases should be prevented if possible... So I dun think it's really worth it the 10 more minutes.

Anyways yes, your times are quite normal, I think. My SP 2 also lasts about 8-9 hours with taking notes in class, but there's also dinner break in between and I'm not constantly note taking, etc.
A quite lowered time when surfing is normal too since the wlan module consumes quite some power when highly active and so does the CPU too.
 
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