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Known issues for SP4

OP
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TonyJackson

New Member
Welcome to the forum

No such issues with mine.

#1 That's a strange one. Have you tried that anywhere other than your home network?

#2 That has been reported by quite a few other people but there hasn't been a cause pined down that I am aware of. I suspect it will be corrected with an update though I don't have that problem. I feel it's related to another one of the problems. probably a driver and the way your Surface is being used..

#3 That has pretty much been pinned down to an issue with Edge and can sometimes be lessened or corrected by using a host file filter or using a different browser. It may also be related to #2 since I'm not seeing it and don't use Edge.

#4 Not sure about that. Does it happen if you open it within a few minutes or does it take longer?

#5 Need more information.

Hi,
#1 yep I have tried with other network and my other devices have no problem
#2#3 waiting for an updated display drive
#4 it happen within a few minutes, in rare cases have to reboot. Touch cover backlight works but the screen keeps black. I need further confirmation
#5 in this case pen and gesture cannot respond anything, I have to press the power button twice
 
OP
T

TonyJackson

New Member
Welcome!

1. Have not experienced any issues with Wi-Fi.
2. Have not experienced any issue with screen flicker.
3. Yep, this one is still an issue I experience and it isn't browser specific on my machine. With all the updates, it's become less of a problem but not completely resolved yet.
4. Yes, I've had this one but unable to reproduce the issue at will. Only happened a few times.

You didn't mention the issue some of us are seeing with battery life. I'm only getting 5-6 hours of casual web surfing, email, Office 365 use. MS advertises "Up to 9hrs" and I'm just not getting anything close to that. In the end, it's not a deal breaker for me as I don't rely on battery power very much.

Sorry I don't have any suggestions for resolving any of the issues you've mentioned. I suspect some of these will be resolved with subsequent updates. FWIW, my experience since launch day is improving which gives me reason to believe MS will get eventually resolve the issues related to sw.

Well, it is normal for Windows only have 2/3 battery life as advertised in real situation. However, if you configure less applications running at the same time, I mean, less background apps and notifications, unnecessary services, you will get much better performance on battery life.

A new problem, the remaining battery life sometimes shows only 1 hour even if I am only doing web surfing. So don't rely on that. Check the task manager and battery usage history.
 

jnjroach

Administrator
Staff member
@BorisHristov - It might help if you generate battery and sleep study report and share your results. You can look at those numbers and see at what times the drains occur and correlate that with what you might have been doing. Some have seen that they actually lose charge while in Hibernate, which would not be good. Throw the following two commands into a .bat file, save on the desktop, and then right click/run as admin. It will generate two html files.

powercfg /batteryreport /output "C:\Users\*boris*\Desktop\battery.html" /duration 7
powercfg /sleepstudy /output "C:\Users\*boris*\Desktop\sleep.html" /duration 7

Note: Max duration can be 14 days.

I have nothing turned off in terms of background notifications, etc. Wi-Fi is on during sleep. Why? Because if you turn all that off then you might as well turn off connected standby and use hibernate. Or even better, disable hibernate, safe disk space and just shutdown :)

Anyway, my battery drain during sleep is about 1.5 % per hour, but I had to use an older display driver to achieve that. Using the latest or beta, and I'm back at the 4% that Zkyevolved sees (and as well as many others from different forums/sites). One guy on answers.microsoft claims that MS is aware of the issue and is working on it. I hope so.

I'm getting about 5 to 6 hours of active use before having to charge. The battery life estimates from the battery report show something similar. Keep in mind that those are estimates. The 5 to 6 is for average everyday stuff (browsing, Office 365, etc). Video conferencing with Skype Video will chew up battery much faster. You can get an idea of how much power an app might use by running a battery report, noting the time, then running the application, and then generating another battery report when done. The built in Skype app consumes a lot of power, but the people on the other end tell me the video quality is spectacular. So perhaps that app is worth it ...

One other thing that I did was to cap the max CPU while on battery, by setting it to 95%. This keeps the CPU from jumping into turbo all the time and maxes at 2.3 GHz (i5 model here). However, not sure if that helps to save any significant amount of power while using the battery and just may revert it back to the default setting. I really won't know for a couple more days of use and checking the numbers in the reports.

The 9 hours claimed by Microsoft is just a marketing gimmick. The scenario (as defined by the fine print *) doesn't represent and realistic use case scenario. You're not going to setup a video to loop and stare at your screen for 9 hours. It's unfortunate that people don't read the fine print there. Many buy the device thinking they are going to get 9 hours of general everyday use - you won't. As for those here claiming battery life LONGER than 9 hours, well, I have very hard time believing them. Perhaps they could share some battery report data to support those claims, or give me money and I'll believe anything they have to say. Until then, I'll just ignore them.
Here....

upload_2015-11-28_19-27-7.png
 

Thanks. It's also helpful to show the usage for each day as well. For example, on 11/23, if you used it on battery for a short amount of time, the estimate tends to run higher. Anyway, I'll post mine as well in a bit here when I'm back at the machine. Perhaps we can have a separate thread for stats.
 

Zkyevolved

Active Member
Yesterday I got 5 hours of very good usage out of my SP4:
  • Streaming for an hour and a half of music while painting with ArtRage from Google Music, then sending it to my Bluetooth speakers (it's on sale BTW if someone is interested!)
  • A full movie in 1080p, which was first downloaded from my Plex server since the app had been acting up.
  • 2 TV shows (each ep 45 minutes) from my Plex server
  • Download around 4GB of data
  • Resynced 2 folders via BT Sync (very large folders with more than 30,000 files) with placeholders (one to the SSD and the other to the SD card)
  • Browsing in the browser
  • and some OneNote usage
This is with Bluetooth, Wifi and approx 70% brightness (as they say, brighter).
I can't complain, it's not light usage.

1.png
2.png

And this is the first drain on my new SP4.
 
CS time on 11/26 is screwy - I had it turned off that day for part of the day. CS drain is between 1 and 2 % per hour. The "Since OS Install" estimate says I'll lose 28% in 16 hours, go dead in 56 hours. However, I have to use an older display driver to achieve that. Using the latest or beta, and my drain rate is 4% per hour (dead in 25 hours). I did have it setup to go into hibernate 2 hours after entering sleep. I've since changed that (yesterday) to 30 minutes.

On 11/27 it says 7 hours of use, but I did charge it part way through the day. Other than that, I charge it once a day in the morning

battery2.PNG
battery1.PNG
 
By the way as I am new in the forum, do you guys happen to know if the issue with the Type Cover not working after a reboot (or after log off) has been reported to Microsoft? And are they working on it? I needed to reboot the machine twice in order for the Type Cover to work again and thankfully I know for this issue from here and Windows Central. I cannot imagine the feeling of someone who is the typical end user and does not read forums...
 

raqball

Active Member
My type cover is recognized with no issues and I've rebooted several times..

Maybe I am just lucky?
 
My type cover is recognized with no issues and I've rebooted several times..

Maybe I am just lucky?

Noup. Mine is too. However after one week of use i now hit this problem which many users reported - from time to time it seems like the type cover loses its connection to the Surface.
 
Yeap. At least from my understanding and from what I read on WindowsCentral there were quite some affected and seeing this problem from time to time...
 

Darnellmc

New Member
I have had the Surface lose connection with the Type Cover just once. But if I have the Type Cover on while connected to the Dock and a keyboard, things get really crazy and I got lots of phantom mouse movement.
 
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