Surface Pro 7 and Surface Laptop 3 get immediate firmware fixes for battery issues

(Image credit: Future)

The Surface Pro 7 and Surface Laptop 3 are out today, and Microsoft thought it would help folks celebrate their new machines by issuing immediate firmware updates which, among other things, improve battery life according to the release notes.

Whether or not battery longevity is somehow less than it should have been at launch for these devices is, of course, another question…

At any rate, whatever the reason, the Surface Pro 7 gets a bunch of fixes including the aforementioned tweaks to the battery, plus Realtek driver updates which improve the “speech experience” with Cortana.

Microsoft observes there are no known issues at launch, and on the topic of any potential problems, adds: “We are listening. Quality is a top priority, and we want to keep you informed about issues impacting customers.”

Intel and AMD differences

As for the Surface Laptop 3, there are two separate batches of firmware for the notebook depending on whether you have a version running an Intel or AMD processor.

Although either way, you get an update to improve battery life – just as with the Surface Pro 7 – and tweaks to improve the integration between system services.

The difference with Intel machines is that you get a fresh display driver for Intel’s Iris Plus Graphics which also aims to improve battery life further.

Those Surface Laptop 3 owners with an AMD chip obviously don’t get that Intel update, but do receive fixes for ‘Surface Hot Plug – System devices’ and the ‘Surface Hid Mini Driver’, both of which improve device reliability Microsoft notes.

The Surface Pro 7 updates were actually rolled out yesterday, so should be available now, whereas the Surface Laptop 3 firmware is marked as rolling out today, so you might have to wait until later before you see it.

As ever with a Surface device, you should get this fresh firmware automatically piped to your device, but you can manually check for updates. To do so, click on the Start button, then head over to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update.

Via Thurrott.com

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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