Ultimate Tips to Max Out Microsoft Surface Battery Life

1 Real-time battery discharging monitoring

Before we deep dive into how to max out the battery life on Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, we need to know how to track battery discharging in your current configuration. By monitoring the battery discharging we are able to know about:

• How much power is used in the entire system in real time?
• What activities will use much power to process?
• Compare power usage when you customize your system configuration.

From my experience, BatteryBar is the best battery monitoring tool out there. It has all features that we need to monitor battery discharging in real-time. Below is all the basic real-time battery information that is available:

Above is the battery information captured on Surface Pro 3. Surface Pro 4 has a slightly smaller battery capacity.

As you can see my current Discharge Rate is 3,539 mW or 3.5W and with 82.9% of battery capacity, so it means that with the current system configuration and activities my battery life still remains at 6 hours and 16 minutes.

Click here to download BatteryBar For Windows

Now you got the idea, to get more battery life you will need to minimize the discharge rate as possible. Now it’s time to max out your Surface Pro 4 battery life, please check out the following tips:

2 Surface Pro Optimization power plan

Every Microsoft Surface device shipped with a predefined power plan called Balanced with very few advanced configurations as below:

Step 1: Turning off the Connected Standby feature

The limited power configuration in Advanced Settings is because of the Connected Standby feature that is enabled by default on every Surface device. To create a new power plan with optimized advanced settings, we need to disable connected standby via Registry Editor.

To turn off connected standby:

1. On your type cover, press + R
2. Type Regedit to open Register Editor.
3. Now you need to go to
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power
4. Double click on CsEnabled and change the Value data from 1 to 0 and click OK.
5. Restart your computer to apply these changes to your system.
6. After restarting your computer, now you can access the full list of power plans and individual advanced settings.

Step 2: Notice your default properties of the Balanced power plan

Before we move on to create the Surface Pro Optimization power plan, here are all the settings of the Balanced power plan that we will copy for creating our new power plan:

Step 3: Creating a new Surface Pro Optimization power plan

To create the Surface Pro Optimization power plan based on the Balanced power plan:

1. Right-click on Start > Control Panel
2. Navigate to Hardware and Sound > Power Options
3. On the left navigation pane, click Create a power plan
4. Type “Surface Pro Optimization” in the Plan name textbox. You can also use whatever name you want here:
5. After creating the power plan, click on Change advanced power settings:
6. Here are all the settings that you will need to change in the new power plan.
   

   Options	On battery	Plugged in
   Internet Explorer JavaScript Timer Frequency	Maximum Power Savings	Maximum Performance
   Wireless Adapter Settings Power Saving Mode	Maximum Power Saving	Maximum Performance
   Sleep Hibernate after	30 Minutes	180 Minutes
   Intel(R) Graphics Settings Intel(R) Graphic Power Plan	Maximum Battery Life	Balanced or Maximum Performance
   PCI Express Link State Power Management	Maximum power savings	Moderate power savings
   Processor power management Minimum processor state	5%	5%
   System cooling policy	Passive	Active
   Maximum processor state	30% – Maximum Underclocking 50% – Medium Underclocking 99% – Full Speed (without Turbo Boost)	100% – Full Speed (with Turbo Boost)
   Display Turn off display after	4 Minutes	10 Minutes
   Display brightness	25%	100%
   Dimmed display brightness	50%	50%
   Enable adaptive brightness	Off	On
   Multimedia settings When sharing media	Allow the computer to sleep	Prevent idling to sleep
   When playing video	Optimise power savings	Optimise video quality

7. After finishing changing, click OK to accept all changes.

Step 4: How to verify the new power plan settings via Command Prompt

After you turned on back the Connected Standby feature, you will no longer access the most advanced power settings from Power Options in the control panel you set before. Here is how you can verify those advanced power settings:

1. Open Command Prompt or PowerShell
2. Type “powercfg -list”
   
3. Copy the GUID of the power plan you previously created, and type “powercfg -query {GUID}“.
   Note To copy the text in Command Prompt, first select the text you want to copy then press Ctrl + C. To paste, move the cursor to where you want to paste the text then Right-Click anywhere on the command prompt window.
   
4. Here is an example of the maximum processor state that I set to 100% on AC power and 70% on DC Power.
   

3Optimizing Cortana Settings

Cortana is a Windows 10 voice assistant, she runs in the background at all times to track your activities including speaking, inking, and typing personalization. She uses your internet connection to send those data to the Cortana server, and also synchronizes suggestions, reminders,  alerts, and personalization information for you.

As you can see, those activities will eat up your battery life. If you want to max out your battery life, you need to optimize the Cortana settings to do as petty things as possible. To do so:

1. Click on the Cortana icon
2. Click the Settings icon
3. And turn off all options there
   

Turn off Cortana completely on Windows 10 anniversary update

Since Windows 10 anniversary, you can’t disable Cortana completely via the Settings anymore. To disable Cortana, you need to change the Computer Configuration via Local Group Policy Editor.

To do that:

1. Click Start and type “gpedit.msc” and press Enter.
2. Go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search.
3.  Double-click on Allow Cortana to change the policy.
4. Select Disabled.
5. Click Apply and OK
   

4 Turn off Wi-Fi while asleep

While connected standby is turned on Surface devices, when you hit the power button on your device, It will go into sleep mode instead of being turned off your device or put your device into hibernation. It works just like your phone and other tablets; your Surface will remain connected to the WiFi to receive emails and notifications.

You can save more battery by turning the WiFi off while your device is in sleep mode. To do so:

1. Go to Settings > System > Power & sleep
2. Under the Network connection section, change the value to “Always”.
   

5Reducing display brightness

Display brightness can use more power than other parts of your computer. For Surface devices, Microsoft has recommended 25% of brightness for getting longer battery life. You might also need to turn off the screen brightness auto adjustment to make sure that the brightness you set is good enough for watching.

To turn off automatic brightness adjustment:

1. Go to Settings > System > Display
2. Turn off the “Change brightness automatically when lighting changes” option.
   

6 Disable startup programs

You can benefit from a faster boot time, reduce your system loads, and save more power juices by disabling unimportant startup programs. To disable startup programs:

1. Go to Task Manager
2. Click on Start-up.
3. Select all programs that you want to disable and click on the Disable button.
   

7 Surf with Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge is an optimized Web Browser for Windows 10 and Microsoft Surface. According to a discussion on Reddit, while you view videos on the YouTube, Microsoft Edge uses H.264 codec which allows the Intel Skylake processor to natively decode with much less CPU power consumption.

Similarly, for the Netflix streaming test that Microsoft conducted on identical Microsoft Surface Books, Microsoft Edge is the best battery efficiency.

Google Chrome Tweaks

However, if you are using Google Chrome you can disable the Flash Player plugin and install H264IFY to solve this problem. To disable the flash player plugin:

1. Go to the Chrome address bar
2. Type: “chrome://plugins“
3. And click on Disable under the Adobe Flash Player section
   
4. To install the h264ify extension, you can go to this URL:
   https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihdccplidncghkekgioiakgal

8 Turn on Battery Saver

Battery Saver is a new feature in Windows 10, by turning on the Battery Saver option, you can extend your battery life by limiting background system activity and push notifications. You can find the apps that run in the background even if you don’t use them by going to Settings > System > Battery Saver > Battery use > Change background app settings.

When you turn on the Battery Saver option, all those apps will not run in the background. To turn on Battery Saver, you can click on the Battery icon on the taskbar and click on the Battery saver to turn on.

On Surface PCs with Power Slider enabled, you just move the slider all the way to the left to activate the battery saver.

9 Turn off Bluetooth radio

Bluetooth on Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book is a key feature when you are using Surface Pen for OneNote activation, Screenshot, and Cortana activation. However, if you think you don’t need these features, you can turn Bluetooth radio off by:

1. Go to Settings > Devices > Bluetooth
2. And switch off the Bluetooth option
   

10 More tips to extend Surface Pro 4 battery life

Turn off backlit on your Surface Type Cover – Backlit on your Surface type cover is also a minor part of battery draining, you can it off to get some extra battery life for your Surface Pro 4.

Close background power-hungry processes – Some CPU-intensive processes appear to run in the background without your acknowledgment, those processes sometimes drain your battery extremely fast. You can go to Task Manager > Processes to check processes that have a high CPU usage if you believe that those processes are not important you can kill them by clicking on the End Task button.

Unplug USB devices you don’t use – On your Surface always comes with a single USB port for connecting a USB device to a mouse, external hard drive, flash drive, phone, or USB hub. Those devices use your Surface’s power while it is connected, so you can unplug all those devices or use an externally powered USB hub for connecting those devices to stop them from draining the battery from your Surface.

Turn off Windows Defender Real-time protection (do at your own risk) – If you stay away from the internet, you can earn more battery life and performance by turning off the Windows Defender Real-time protection. It will reduce CPU stress by not scanning all processes and files you access in real-time. To do that, go to Settings > Update & security > Windows Defender and turn off the Real-time protection.

Using an external battery pack (power bank)

Those are the ultimate tips that will extend your Surface Pro 4 battery life. However, it will decrease your Surface performance. This is not a big deal for note-taking or basic processing. If you want to play games or edit photos or videos, you should use an external battery pack for your Surface Pro or Book.

Here are our top picks for external power packs for charging Microsoft Surface PCs:

For more information about the external battery pack for Microsoft Surface check out our buyers’ guide here.