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Surface Laptop 3 - Battery life drain

Anonymous
2020-02-16T22:30:04+00:00

Hi,

I just recently got my Surface Laptop 3 around a week ago. The laptop itself has been great, but the battery life has been absolutely horrendous. 

The marketing claimed I should expect to see 11.5 hours worth of battery life, but I've been getting results far from that.

I bought the base model Surface Laptop 3, the Platinum Alcantara version, i5 with 128 GB of storage, and 8 GB of ram. I'd recently noticed my laptop had been acting funky and I decided to do a battery report on it. The results were as followed. My laptop battery life has drastically dropped within only a week and to think that I were to expect such things to happen to a $1100 laptop is dumbfounding. During this week, I've only used Google Chrome and Instagram, two apps that shouldn't drain the battery life by this much. I don't intend on returning it just yet, but it would be of great assistance to me if there was any other possible solutions to my issue.

2020-02-07 7:10:36 - 6:28:36 -
2020-02-08 5:42:35 9:02:57<br><br>177 % / 16 h 5:21:34 8:29:39<br><br>188 % / 16 h
2020-02-09 4:08:49 50:47:01<br><br>32 % / 16 h 3:54:47 47:55:01<br><br>33 % / 16 h
2020-02-10 4:45:23 54:47:43<br><br>29 % / 16 h 4:29:16 51:42:08<br><br>31 % / 16 h
2020-02-11 5:26:45 279325:58:44<br><br>- / 16 h 5:08:18 427252:08:58<br><br>- / 16 h
2020-02-12 5:17:20 877473:18:06<br><br>- / 16 h 4:59:26 876115:32:23<br><br>- / 16 h
2020-02-13 5:45:30 13:22:43<br><br>120 % / 16 h 5:26:24 12:38:20<br><br>127 % / 16 h
2020-02-14 4:53:36 334601:05:49<br><br>- / 16 h 4:37:22 118247:27:18<br><br>- / 16 h
2020-02-15 3:46:49 10:58:22<br><br>146 % / 16 h 3:35:19 10:24:58<br><br>154 % / 16 h
Surface | Surface Laptop | Power and battery

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-05-20T05:00:11+00:00

    I have had this same problem. I recently bought a surface laptop 3 256GB i5 13.5" near the start of the year, and I've noticed that the battery life is terrible. I have started to get concerned because apparently the battery life should be around 11.5hrs but my laptop dies after about 5hrs. This is a struggle, as I am a student and I don't want to carry my charger around all the time. Is there any way this can be fixed?

    10+ people found this answer helpful.
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  2. Anonymous
    2020-02-17T01:08:36+00:00

    Thanks for your response!

    I've done your solution and I'm happy to say that it has worked!

    Thank you!

    8 people found this answer helpful.
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  3. Anonymous
    2020-02-17T00:41:39+00:00

    Hi Mithran Vallipuram,

    Thank you for reaching out Microsoft Community. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.

    The Surface Laptop 3's battery should last up to 11.5 hours of typical device usage but if there's a lot of applications running while using it on battery power, this is perhaps the reason why it drains faster than expected. However, in your case, it drains fast than normal even when you were only using it for Google Chrome and Instagram which is kind of strange. 

    To help you out with this concern, can you tell us if you already updated the Surface device? Have you uninstalled/reinstalled the battery driver of your Surface?  Were you able to check in Task Manager if there's only 2 applications running or have you checked for any applications running in the background?

    To uninstall/reinstall the battery driver, kindly:

    • Open Device Manager
    • Expand Batteries
    • Right-click on the battery drivers available and click "uninstall device".Make sure to connect your Surface to it's power supply. Then, download the drivers and firmware for the Surface Laptop 3 based on it's processor from this link : Download Drivers and Firmware. Choose Win10_18362 .msi file available. Run and install and if prompted to restart the device to load the drivers successfully, just restart your Surface to install the drivers. After redownloading the drivers, kindly charge your Surface device to 100%, use it on battery power and run the battery report again and include the battery report in your next reply. I also would like you to:

    If this helps, please let our Community know by marking this post as answer. Otherwise, don't hesitate to respond to this thread for further assistance. 

    Kind Regards,

    Crest_Z

    7 people found this answer helpful.
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  4. Anonymous
    2020-02-26T16:30:11+00:00

    Hi Crest_Z, I'm experiencing just about the same, and see similar figures on my battery report, of around 5 hours of estimated battery life in active state.  I'm using only Slack and Chromium Edge with around a dozen tabs open, none of them running anything serious and w/o media playback.  What I've tried so far is to uninstall / reinstall the battery driver, run Surface Diagnostic Toolkit and made sure Windows is up to date.  I've also Enabled "Turn off caching of streaming media to disk, " although I have no media running.  Still getting the same 5 hours.

    Is there anything you may be able to find out or put in a ticket, etc. if I sent you my battery report and sleepstudy report html files ?  I'm going to need a 20k or 30k mAh battery pack if this doesn't change, and although I'm happy with the machine overall, for the monitor aspect ratio, facial recognition login and the touchscreen, I had been on Thinkpad since 1998 and the X1 Carbon which was my main machine until Surface Laptop3, got me 8-9 hours of life.  Losing 40% of it is quite an unexpected downside in light of the widely publicized "11.5 hours"..

    gn

    3 people found this answer helpful.
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