• Surface Pro 3 battery problems continue

    Posted on November 10, 2016 at 12:04 CST by • Comment in the Forums

    If you have a Surface Pro 3, and you’re still having battery problems – in spite of the November 7 firmware/driver update – you aren’t alone.

    On the Microsoft Answers forum thread devoted to the topic, Barb Bowman has the latest:

    I’ve been trying to get clarifications on almost a daily basis since this all started… In order to install [the Nov. 7 driver update] successfully, the OS must *think* that the battery is at 40% charge or greater. I don’t know any way to trick the OS into doing this.

    If you have a Surface pro 3 and you haven’t pulled a Belichick, you should check what your computer says about your battery. From my Sept. 20 InfoWorld article on the topic:

    Make sure your SP3 is fully charged, unplug it from the wall, right-click Start (or hit Ctrl-X), and choose Command Prompt (Admin). In the resulting box type: powercfg /batteryreport and press Enter (note the space before the / and no space in batteryreport). That generates a file, typically c:\Windows\System32\battery-report.html.

    Open the file. Near the top of the report you’ll see the battery manufacturer name (likely SIMPLO or LGC-LGC) followed by a series of numbers. Design Capacity will tell you what the battery should be pushing. For LGC batteries, that’s going to be 42,157 mWh. Look at the Full Charge Capacity, which may or may not match the Design Capacity, thus showing one level of degradation of your battery reserves. Then look at the list of Recent usage power states, where you may find that your battery’s been unable to get up to a full charge.

    Barb doesn’t have good news, for those of you who are still having battery problems:

    The only other option right now is to contact support, pay the $29 to talk to someone and hope you get someone that can really trouble shoot. My opinion is that the support agents will just send you to the $450 out of warranty exchange and there’s no guarantee that you will receive a device that won’t develop issues after the short warranty on it expires (or has other problems).

    If you have a Surface Pro 3 – or know someone who does – you should take the time to check.

    Windows Patches/Security , ,
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