Really Terrible Battery Life With Pro 2?

[jrapdx]

Just wondering why you say to keep automatic updates turned off?

Simple. Updates, particularly FW, have not always proven benign. The famous Dec 10 FW update is a case in point. Hence the advice to not automatically apply updates until shown to be safe.

Actually this has been my policy for a long time, with diverse OS/platforms. Comes under the heading, "if it's working don't try to fix it". On my SP2, I have the update setting in place to notify me of new updates, and after review, I'll decide which to then download and install.

 

[CreativeLemming]

You probably want to be a little less blunt in your first point then. For example, not applying security updates could soon render your perfectly working device unusable, or worse, when a gaping security hole isn't updated due to your blanket advice. Maybe you want to say:

1. Keep automatic updates off and only update if your device is unusable, unless it's a security update in which case do install it, and the same goes for windows defender.

...a little more long winded, but safer for those who take advice at face value.

 

[Philtastic]

Battery life will highly depend on what you're doing on the tablet. The advertised 8-9 hours is only if you are doing light tasks like web browsing, email, and word processing. If you're watching videos on either Youtube or your own media, you could probably cut that down to 4-6 hours. If you're running a program that requires the processor to go full tilt, 3-4 hours. Throw in GPU usage and you get down to 1-2 hours.

As others have stated, it could also be a bug that keeps the CPU ramped up.

 

[revmike]

Never had a problem with battery life and I've had an sd card in mine from the beginning.

 

[Cambo]

same here. my sd card in all the time, no issues at all

 

[Jasmine]

Same thing here. Barely getting over 3 hours and that's just with Firefox, Skype, and possibly Microsoft Office up. Guess I'll have to do another return.

 

[Philtastic]

Same thing here. Barely getting over 3 hours and that's just with Firefox, Skype, and possibly Microsoft Office up. Guess I'll have to do another return.

You may want to keep task manager open and see if something is using your CPU constantly.

 

[eee]

Same thing here. Barely getting over 3 hours and that's just with Firefox, Skype, and possibly Microsoft Office up. Guess I'll have to do another return.

Do you have Google Drive or Dropbox running in the background? They eat a LOT of battery.

 

[CrippsCorner]

Yeah there's got to be something else to it... never heard of cards decreasing batteries. I've had 2 Surface Pro's now and they've never been affected.

 

[eelpout]

Battery life will highly depend on what you're doing on the tablet. The advertised 8-9 hours is only if you are doing light tasks like web browsing, email, and word processing.

That's what Anandtech said they were getting after the Oct. update and I never get anything close to that doing the same tasks. I'm lucky if I get 5.5 hours. I'm wondering if it might have something to do with the people/mail/calendar triumvirate, which seems to be rather up there in CPU time use.

 

[Philtastic]

When nothing is going on, you should see something like this in Task Manager:



I have IE and Mail running in the background.

 

[Dayton]

Yeah there's got to be something else to it... never heard of cards decreasing batteries. I've had 2 Surface Pro's now and they've never been affected.

Google it, surprised it is news to any SP2 owner. Monitor CPU utilization and after a few wakes you'll notice the percentage getting pegged at 24% or above. To stop it you can either disable Realtek Audio or force a sleep / wake. Of course if you aren't monitoring you will probably not notice but the battery performance will take a hit. This is what was happening with the broken firmware and owners experiencing battery drain over night, the device wouldn't hibernate but instead wake and start taxing the CPU if a SD card was mounted.