Yeah, I bought past versions of the Surface and the Surface Book. They would often never wake up from sleep or the battery would be dead unexpectedly. Hard for me to trust them after feeling like I wasted money multiple times.
Even on an old, well-understood, and revered[0] laptop (the ThinkPad T530), I was having an unexpectedly-dead battery when running Windows.
It's a work laptop, and it is pretty much only used for occasional actually-portable computing work like programming of other devices in the field. It spends most of its time in the work truck, hibernated and unplugged -- sometimes, for weeks at a stretch.
I began to accept its increasingly-poor apparent battery health and started to explain it to myself as "Well, it is pretty old."
Or so I thought, anyway: One day it was sitting there on a table, unplugged, and I noticed that it came to life by itself and then hibernated again a few minutes later.
WTF?
Waaaay too much investigation later, I found that a part of an HP printer driver was forcing it to wake every couple of hours...for reasons that I don't care to explore, since none of those reasons could possibly have any positive merit.
Waaaay too much poking-and-prodding after that, I was able to disable the offending thing using powercfg on the command line.
And now, it seems fine. The battery life is not particularly good and never will be, but at least it's not "Surprise! I'm completely dead!!!" anymore.
This kind of sloppiness in software seems to be considered normal in the Windows space, and an abusive HP printer driver doesn't care if it is running on a 9-year-old ThinkPad or a 9-day-old Surface: It will abuse all of them just the same.
[0]: I hate numeric keypads, and gamer laptops, and computers that are built down to a budget as a primary design criteria. The T530 is approximately the last 15" PC laptop that lacks a numeric keypad, and that does not have stupid gamer-glam functions or styling, and that isn't built down to a budget price. It is stoic and plain and black, and both the keyboad and the touchpad are centered on the screen.
ssl-3|1 year ago
Even on an old, well-understood, and revered[0] laptop (the ThinkPad T530), I was having an unexpectedly-dead battery when running Windows.
It's a work laptop, and it is pretty much only used for occasional actually-portable computing work like programming of other devices in the field. It spends most of its time in the work truck, hibernated and unplugged -- sometimes, for weeks at a stretch.
I began to accept its increasingly-poor apparent battery health and started to explain it to myself as "Well, it is pretty old."
Or so I thought, anyway: One day it was sitting there on a table, unplugged, and I noticed that it came to life by itself and then hibernated again a few minutes later.
WTF?
Waaaay too much investigation later, I found that a part of an HP printer driver was forcing it to wake every couple of hours...for reasons that I don't care to explore, since none of those reasons could possibly have any positive merit.
Waaaay too much poking-and-prodding after that, I was able to disable the offending thing using powercfg on the command line.
And now, it seems fine. The battery life is not particularly good and never will be, but at least it's not "Surprise! I'm completely dead!!!" anymore.
This kind of sloppiness in software seems to be considered normal in the Windows space, and an abusive HP printer driver doesn't care if it is running on a 9-year-old ThinkPad or a 9-day-old Surface: It will abuse all of them just the same.
[0]: I hate numeric keypads, and gamer laptops, and computers that are built down to a budget as a primary design criteria. The T530 is approximately the last 15" PC laptop that lacks a numeric keypad, and that does not have stupid gamer-glam functions or styling, and that isn't built down to a budget price. It is stoic and plain and black, and both the keyboad and the touchpad are centered on the screen.