Firmware update gives Microsoft Surface battery bother the boot
Surface Book and Pro 4 might now actually last as long as they were designed to
If you bought a Surface Pro 4 or Surface Book and weren’t getting the battery life you expected, you definitely weren’t alone.
Power management and sleep mode bugs in Microsoft’s latest hybrids were causing them to drain their batteries and get extremely hot when they should have been in an ultra-low power state.
Connected Standby was supposed to let the system check for emails or accept Skype calls, without using up a significant amount of battery, but on the Surface it was doing the opposite – leaving owners with a drained device.
Microsoft has now released a firmware update that should (hopefully) make everything better.
It ships with a whole host of driver tweaks and software updates, but the end result should be a laptop or tablet that holds its charge, even when you’ve powered it down and stowed it in a bag.
Updates are enabled by default on the Surface range, so unless you’ve switched them off manually, your device should start downloading the firmware update the next time you take it online.
This is great news, but it took Microsoft a long time to acknowledge there was even a problem. Reports of unusual power drain had started appearing on Microsoft’s support forums as far back as November.
A post referencing the issue, which suggested enabling hibernation instead of using Connected Standby, appeared on the 3rd of December, but it’s taken until now for a real fix to arrive.
Considering Microsoft makes both the hardware and software that go into each Surface, it’s a bit disappointing that bugs like this have been left unsquashed for so long.
Have you got a Surface Pro 4 or Surface Book that had battery problems? Let us know if the firmware update fixed your problems on Facebook or Twitter
Tom Morgan-Freelander
Deputy Editor 
