Surface Pro 5 and 6 hybrids are being affected by frustrating battery issues in some cases, at least going by reports from a number of owners online.
This was highlighted by Windows Latest which spotted several posts on Microsoft’s Answers.com support forum, and while some posts date back quite some time (to April), there are a number of recent complaints pointing the finger at Microsoft’s latest update for the Surface Pro 5 and 6.
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This particular firmware update was supposed to give users better battery performance, but at least according to these reports, it has made things worse.
The most recent thread has two users airing their grievances, with the original poster saying that their Surface Pro 6 is losing 10 to 15% of its battery while the device is turned off. A second user notes that following the recent August firmware update, in a 24-hour period, their SP6 battery is draining 20% when the machine is turned off. Nasty.
In another thread, a Surface Pro 5 user observes that: “My battery has been experiencing significant capacity issues. A full charge lasts at most 3 hours on normal load (mostly spreadsheet, Word), which fluctuates wildly and has been decreasing.”
The user adds that: “I started noticing worsening battery issues roughly correlating with the Aug19 and Sep18 updates.”
A Microsoft MVP and very active volunteer moderator at Answers.com, Barb Bowman, responded to say: “It took them [Microsoft] 9 months+ to acknowledge battery issues with SP3 and the fixes didn’t solve everything. This issue is just starting to trend. I keep emailing an internal contact on it but no replies.”
Later in the thread, Bowman adds: “I’ve seen more than a few reports on SP2017 [Surface Pro 5] this past week that look like yours. When I asked an internal contact about this, he asked that people use the Feedback Hub to report a problem and share the link back in a reply here (also include [a] battery report in the problem report).”
So by all accounts, this is your best course of action, for now. And keep your fingers crossed that Microsoft is investigating this and looking into any possible battery problems caused by the latest firmware update.
Plentiful evidence
We found evidence of these issues on Reddit, too. A Surface Pro owner observed: “Since the 239.3101.139.0 update [August firmware] for Surface Pro 6, a few new bugs were introduced:
“Due to a faulty BDPROCHOT reading, the device can be stuck at 400MHz after charge. A modern computer stuck at 400MHz is unusable.
“The battery reading is broken. When the power state changes, it can be stuck at 100%. A mobile device that cannot give battery states is unusable on the go … Plenty of reports about the stuck battery indicator here and there, people are just realizing it.”
Another poster follows up: “I own a Surface Pro 5, battery discharge rate has been broken a while ago in a firmware update. Yet not fixed.”
Note that regarding the separate 400MHz bug also mentioned above, we’ve already heard other reports of this crippling problem.
It certainly seems that Microsoft has got some serious work to do in ironing out the various issues documented here, and hopefully we’ll get some official acknowledgement of the battery problems soon enough.
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