4 ms·

My Microsoft Surface Pro 4 can do 100% to 0 in less than 48hrs, powered off the whole time. It's old now, but it became that way in the first 2-3 years, without

by rpigab 3y ago

My Microsoft Surface Pro 4 can do 100% to 0 in less than 48hrs, powered off the whole time. It's old now, but it became that way in the first 2-3 years, without even using it that much. It's such a pain to use because when it's at zero, If I plug it in and power it on, it'll boot Windows, then at any moment will power off by itself, maybe because Windows doesn't want to run at low battery, maybe it's consuming more than what is being charged, idk. I have set the desktop background to 0x000000, removed all non-essential startup services, reinstalled it from scratch, etc. So everytime I want to use it, I have to wait till it's 5-10% before powering it on. The worst part is that if you look it up online, some ppl say it changed drastically after some Windows update, can't confirm because it's not my main PC, I don't remember the exact moment where it had this problem.

tzs 3y ago
Similar with my Surface Pro 4. After a couple years of casual use (it was my "browse on the couch" computer) the battery was significantly degraded. I think a big part of the problem is that "off" doesn't necessarily mean "off". If you just do "Shutdown" from the menu it is just some kind of suspend or hibernate state (I'm not sure which...PC hardware and Windows have a bunch of different "not fully on" states). It's still doing stuff that uses power. It's also doing periodic things like automatic updates. The net result I believe is that even though from my point of view it was only being used occasionally, it was actually going through a battery cycle almost as often as if it had been my main computer. I haven't used Windows in a while so don't remember all the details, but I think if you hold shift while invoking "Shutdown" it shuts down more than a shiftless "Shutdown". There are also command line commands that will shut down even more. I never did find a way to shut it down enough that I could not use it for a week and still have a usable charge on it. Hey, do you have occasional problems with disk encryption? Every so often when I open it I get some obnoxiously bright screen telling me I need to enter my Bitlocker recovery key. But if I cancel that it goes ahead and boots and has no trouble decrypting the disk.
- rpigab 3y ago
  No, I don't have disk encryption set up on the Surface.

by rpigab 3y ago

tzs 3y ago

Similar with my Surface Pro 4. After a couple years of casual use (it was my "browse on the couch" computer) the battery was significantly degraded. I think a big part of the problem is that "off" doesn't necessarily mean "off". If you just do "Shutdown" from the menu it is just some kind of suspend or hibernate state (I'm not sure which...PC hardware and Windows have a bunch of different "not fully on" states). It's still doing stuff that uses power. It's also doing periodic things like automatic updates. The net result I believe is that even though from my point of view it was only being used occasionally, it was actually going through a battery cycle almost as often as if it had been my main computer. I haven't used Windows in a while so don't remember all the details, but I think if you hold shift while invoking "Shutdown" it shuts down more than a shiftless "Shutdown". There are also command line commands that will shut down even more. I never did find a way to shut it down enough that I could not use it for a week and still have a usable charge on it. Hey, do you have occasional problems with disk encryption? Every so often when I open it I get some obnoxiously bright screen telling me I need to enter my Bitlocker recovery key. But if I cancel that it goes ahead and boots and has no trouble decrypting the disk.

rpigab 3y ago
No, I don't have disk encryption set up on the Surface.