I performed a battery test

[girarcat]

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.

 

[jnjroach]

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.

 

[girarcat]

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?

 

[jnjroach]

You can adjust those settings in the Advanced Settings in the Power Management Control Panel, setting the Critical Power Settings.

 

[girarcat]

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!

 

[DragonGamer]

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.

 

[Ruudfood]

Which CPU do you have? The 4200 or 4300?

 

[girarcat]

The older one, which I think is 4200