14 DAY TRIAL // The number of users complaining about battery issues with the Surface Pro 3 has increased significantly in the last couple of months, and many owners have noticed that their 2-in-1 devices suffer from huge battery drain, in some cases leading to an autonomy of just 1 hour.
Microsoft says in a post on the Community forums that it’s aware of these problems and is now looking into reports, claiming that it can be fixed with a software update.
This is kind of good news for impacted Surface Pro 3 owners who were afraid that their devices were suffering from hardware issues, but it’s still a painful wait until Microsoft releases a fix.
“We are aware of some customers reporting a scenario with their Surface Pro 3 batteries in which the system is reporting lower battery capacity than expected. We’ve isolated this to a limited number of customers experiencing this issue. Based on our investigations we can confirm that it is not an issue with the battery cells, and we believe this is something that can be addressed via software. We’re working through the details of how we deliver that,” Microsoft explains.
“It’s perfectly normal”
The original post reporting the battery issue with the Surface Pro 3 reveals that no workaround has made a difference so far, pointing out that battery life has degraded gradually over the last few weeks.
Reinstalling the driver seems to be leading to even worse battery life, with the poster saying that, in some cases, the Surface can only last 30 minutes.
“I called Microsoft support and they were being extremely unhelpful. Insist that this was a software problem (which the chat support person already did) and it's ‘perfectly normal’ for battery capacity to degrade,” the poster explains.
For the moment, however, the confirmation from Microsoft is all we got, but at least it’s something, especially given that so many users were afraid of hardware issues that could impact their devices. The next firmware update could help fix this, but don’t expect it sooner than next month.