Microsoft releases firmware fix for faulty Surface Pro 3 batteries Frustrated Surface Pro 3 customers unable to properly charge their batteries have been offered a fix by Microsoft. Last month Microsoft 'fessed up to its battery woes, saying they were down to software problems rather than a hardware fault. Some Surface Pro 3 devices have been working as long as the power is plugged in, but …
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The length of the cable doesn't matter. If the battery reports less than 3% the Surface shuts down, even if it is on mains power! I managed to get mine replaced under guaranty, but I need 12 attempts at booting to get to the login screen without it switching off, before I could reset it to factory. Luckily it held through the reset...
Yeah, except that's not comparing like-for-like.
Surface Pros tend to be bought by people who want a really skinny laptop, rather than a really expensive tablet. That's the same market segment as the Apple Macbook.
true. the Macbook neither works as a tablet (no removable keyboard) nor does it (or any other Mac laptop) support touch (which is pretty commonplace in the PC world). it's a good little laptop, but it's not a fair comparison.
the iPad Pro and the Surface Pro are more apples to apples (pun intended) even though the Surface is a more general/backwards compatible computing device and the iPad Pro essentially a jumped up phone ... but in terms of the sorts of things you can do when you plug in the keyboard and swipe around the touchscreen it is a fair comparison... especially when you look at the price tags
As Trading Standards only know too well, petrol pump "fuel gauges" are notoriously inaccurate at the best of times, but always seemingly deliver less than you paid for.
Good to see a MS firmware fix keeping up the traditions.
As fuel gauges go, was it accurate, but now inaccurate, or inaccurate, now accurate, I suppose we'll never really know.
It shows though there is more than meets the eye regards actual battery capacities, when a battery is tested for a warranty claim in-store by either Microsoft or Apple. This so called fix all sounds a bit iffy to me.
My battery had dropped from its design capacity of 43Wh to 17 in July, and was dropping day by day. I'm on the Insider program and I suspect something was pushed out last week, as capacity mystically has been recovering since and I'm now up to 35Wh and still trending upwards, which after 247 discharge cycles doesn't seem bad.
Edit: just to add I've been working on battery today for 4 hours, and still have 39% left, which claims to be 2h 57m... This is the best I've seen in a long time.
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Let's hope the "fix" was a better job than that done by the original coders. Better charge the device on a large concrete slab, surrounded by sandbags, water tanks and other blast mitigation measures in the event there's a fencepost miscalculation in the overcharge protection routine.
similar experience... before yesterdays update I'd get somewhere between 45 mins and an hour on a full charge. yesterday after the update (and another reboot for good measure) I got over 5 hours before the thing finally ran out of juice and I had to re-tether.
what is frustrating is I had to go through a whole return/replace procedure on my original SP3 for this issue that I could probably have avoided
In case anyone cares, my SP3 battery capacity is now showing as 41,732mWh compared to a design capacity of 42,157mWh and a cycle count of 248. Battery life is back to a full day and now regularly lasts a full day - but admittedly I don't sit running encoding tasks and visual studio compiles all day.
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