Whats APPS are you running in Systray? Post your "Battery Life"

[Jesse San Nicolas]

I'm trying to find out who gets the best battery on their Surface Pro 3 vs whats apps you have running in the Systray.

The reason is that it really blows getting only 5.08 hours of average battery life on my new SP3 just web browsing. That's slightly more than half of Microsoft's advertised claims of up to 9 hours of web surfing.

I have uninstalled my Avast antivirus 2 weeks after ownership, and see no improvement in battery life. Not sure what else I can uninstall since I need my OneDrive, Google Drive, and Picasa's Google+ Photo's always synced to the cloud for automatically backing up my data and pictures.

I want to see who's getting above 6+hours on their SP3, and what setup they are running, so we can narrow who's setup is best for max battery life


So lets get to it. Please post your reply's in this order:

1. Which SP3 model you have?
2. Which apps do you have running in your "systray" at all times
3. What apps do you mainly run on your SP3 most of the time?
4. Battery reports - Average battery life since OS install (The last line in your battery report)?
5. Average click above lowest screen brightness setting and is "Adaptive Brightness" turned on?

So I will start it off. Here is my setup:

1- i5, 256GB
2- OneDrive, Google Drive, Picasa Google+ Photo Backup.
3- Chrome
4- Average 5.08 hours
5- 1 click above- No

 

[mahdi75]

That's probably because of Chrome. There are several threads in this forum about it.
Try installing latest (beta) version, and also make sure to disable chrome background task from settings.

What I do is: I use chrome when docked and plugged in, but I use modern IE when on battery. IE is not that bad

 

[ctitanic]

I want to add that using other Google products such as Google Drive, Picasa Google+ Photo Backup and Hangouts decrease greatly your battery life.

 

[ctitanic]

So lets get to it. Please post your reply's in this order:

1. Which SP3 model you have?
2. Which apps do you have running in your "systray" at all times
3. What apps do you mainly run on your SP3 most of the time?
4. Battery reports - Average battery life since OS install (The last line in your battery report)?
5. Average click above lowest screen brightness setting and is "Adaptive Brightness" turned on?

1. PRO 3 i5, 4Gb
2. AVG, AVG Tune up, iCloud.
3. Mail, IE Metro, OneNote, snapping tool
4. 6.06 hrs, should be around 7 but I have biweekly meetings using Hangouts, the battery life with Hangouts is reduced to around 3 hours for those days and that affects the average battery life since OS install.
5. 40%, AD off.

 

[jnjroach]

i5/8/256

OneDrive
OneDrive for Business
Office Upload Monitor
Lync Desktop
OneNote Clipper
Bluetooth

Because I do many Lync Conference calls during the week, I'm getting 5.5-7.5 hours of battery....

 

[daniielrp]

1. PRO 3 i3, 4GB.
2. Nothing. At all. (Unless OneDrive counts? But as it's built in I assume everyone will have that)
3. Mail, IE Metro, Codewriter, Skype, Hyper (youtube app).
4. 8:09hrs
5. 60%, AD On.

 

[kristalsoldier]

SP3, i5, 4GB, 128GB
OneNote, OneDrive
Mail, MUI IE11, Skype, Bing News, Next Gen, Weather, Clock
Average: 8.30 mins (See attached)
38%, Adaptive Display off

 

[Liam2349]

Off the top of my head, I would blame all Google services for your battery issues.

 

[Jesse San Nicolas]

Wow, seems the i3-64GB and the i5-128GB models get superb battery life, maybe some i5 -256GB and i7-256GB and i7-512GB users can chime in as well.

My thinking is maybe the i5-256GB uses more battery power to power the 8GB of RAM and the 256GB mSATA SSD, whereas the 128GB and 64GB models only have 4GB, which might me the reason for decreased battery life on the more expensive models. I would guess the i7-512GB probably gets the worse battery life of all being the most powerful of them all.

Come on guys, lets get more user stats and models so we can narrow the best configured systems with best battery life. I'm sure once we get more input from other users we will start seeing patterns emerge.

 

[daniielrp]

Wow, seems the i3-64GB and the i5-128GB models get superb battery life, maybe some i5 -256GB and i7-256GB and i7-512GB users can chime in as well.

My thinking is maybe the i5-256GB uses more battery power to power the 8GB of RAM and the 256GB mSATA SSD, whereas the 128GB and 64GB models only have 4GB, which might me the reason for decreased battery life on the more expensive models. I would guess the i7-512GB probably gets the worse battery life of all being the most powerful of them all.

Come on guys, lets get more user stats and models so we can narrow the best configured systems with best battery life. I'm sure once we get more input from other users we will start seeing patterns emerge.

In a "logical sense" it should be the opposite - i5 and & i7 should get better battery life as the processor can get a job done much more quickly then return to a low power state where it won't be using as much power.

Random example:

Encode a film - 5mins full power for i7 v 15mins full power for i3 - even though the i7 will be using slightly more battery, it does so for such a small amount of time compared to the lower end it makes up for it.

Not sure about RAM, guess it depends whether the full 8GB is using power even if only 2-3 are being used.

 

[kristalsoldier]

Wow, seems the i3-64GB and the i5-128GB models get superb battery life, maybe some i5 -256GB and i7-256GB and i7-512GB users can chime in as well.

My thinking is maybe the i5-256GB uses more battery power to power the 8GB of RAM and the 256GB mSATA SSD, whereas the 128GB and 64GB models only have 4GB, which might me the reason for decreased battery life on the more expensive models. I would guess the i7-512GB probably gets the worse battery life of all being the most powerful of them all.

Come on guys, lets get more user stats and models so we can narrow the best configured systems with best battery life. I'm sure once we get more input from other users we will start seeing patterns emerge.

Does it take more power - significantly more power - to run 8GB of RAM as opposed to 4GB of RAM?

 

[Jesse San Nicolas]

In a "logical sense" it should be the opposite - i5 and & i7 should get better battery life as the processor can get a job done much more quickly then return to a low power state where it won't be using as much power.

Random example:

Encode a film - 5mins full power for i7 v 15mins full power for i3 - even though the i7 will be using slightly more battery, it does so for such a small amount of time compared to the lower end it makes up for it.

Not sure about RAM, guess it depends whether the full 8GB is using power even if only 2-3 are being used.

Its a catch-22 of sorts. Web surfing for example has no distinguishable difference in either of the i3/i5/i7 models, yet I can assure you the i5 and i7 use more power than the i3.

The reason is the i3 has a max TDP of 11.5 watts, and the i5 and i7 have a max TDP of 15 watts.

Of course like your encoding example shows, it also depends on what your doing, be it web browsing or film encoding.

As for the RAM, according to CPUz, the SP3 has only one RAM slot, so I'm guessing the 8GB RAM does have slightly more power consumption than 4GB.

Does it take more power - significantly more power - to run 8GB of RAM as opposed to 4GB of RAM?

I would guess slightly more, since its a single stick of RAM in the SP3. The biggest problem is every little bit of wattage counts when it comes to the SP3 and battery life, because of how thin the SP3 is. Also, Microsoft throttling just about every single aspect of the SP3 via firmware, from CPU, to RAM, to whatever else they can think of doesn't help in the performance aspect, but gets them a little closer to that 9 hours of claimed battery life.