Microsoft Working on a Fix for Battery Drain on Surface Pro 4, Surface Book

There are many customers who have been complaining about the display adapter crash problem on their new Surface Pro 4 tablets, and now it seems that Microsoft has finally acknowledge the problem and is working on bringing a fix.

Microsoft has recently released a firmware update that was supposed to take care of this issue for Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book owners, but apparently there are still problems being reported. Nonetheless, Redmond has been moving pretty fast, having already released fixes for screen flickering, touchpad anomalies, and others.

Fix incoming for battery drain on Surface Pro 4, Surface Book

Now Microsoft is working on a solution for the battery drain problem that affects both the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book. A Program Manager on the Surface engineering team reached out and said the following:

Yes, The ‘standby’ battery life is an issue we are working on and have been working on. We can put the processor into a deeper sleep state than it is currently set to. We couldn’t do it at RTM for a variety of reasons, power management is a very hard computer science problem to solve especially with new silicon. Currently it is not in the deepest “sleep” that it can be so there are wake events that would not otherwise wake it. We will have an update for this issue sometime soon in the new year.

One of the ways that you can improve the situation right away is to make sure you don’t have web sites open that are actively streaming when you close cover of go put the device to sleep. Especially if you have a website open that uses sound. This will keep the PLM service running.

To make it really sip power like your pro 2 did. Pro 2 did not have Connected Standby. It went straight to hibernate or S4. To do this on your book or Pro4 you can make that happen. To do this have the device go to Hibernate (deeper sleep and not listening) instead of “Sleep” (always on or connected Standby)…

So, as we can see, a fix is coming early next year, and meanwhile the suggestion for a temporary workaround is to change the power properties to Hibernate.

There are plenty of problems, bugs and glitches affecting both the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book, so this doesn’t help Microsoft too much in their quest to gain more market share. But let’s hope that they will become an increasingly better company when dealing with hardware products.