Underwhelming Battery Life on Surface Laptop 5

I have been using my Surface Laptop 5 (i7-1255U, 16GB RAM) for about 3 weeks now and I am honestly quite disappointed with the battery life on this laptop. On a full charge, I get around 3-4 hours doing basic tasks like web browsing, YouTube and Word.

To be clear I am not expecting it to last however long Microsoft claims but I would have thought it would last at least 7+ hours.

I'm curious to know whether my laptop has a faulty battery, some sort of background task that's draining the battery or the fact that it's the i7 model.

I would also appreciate it if any of you guys who also own a Surface Laptop 5 or even older models let me know how your battery life is.

Thanks!

Comments

  • We have 2 x surface laptop 4’s at work (Ryzen), get 3-4 hours too.. that’s with Spotify, rdp, YouTube, word, pdf, outlook etc

    • And there people saying that the AMD SL4 get better battery life :/

      • +1

        I have an AMD SL3 and it doesn’t feel like it has better battery life.

  • On a full charge, I get around 3-4 hours doing basic tasks like web browsing,

    I still get that on an old Surface Pro 3

    • +9

      With or without bolding?

  • One option to check is you have the 80% battery charge option enabled.

    However the SL isnt renown for great battery life. I just take a long charge cable

  • +2

    turn the screen brightness down, and put laptop into low power mode / battery mode.

  • +1

    To be fair looking at videos on YouTube isn't really considered "basic usage".

    Don't expect much from laptops nowadays with the high def screens and all that

  • Thanks so much for sharing this. I have no idea what is going on with laptops these days. It is so sad to hear new surface 5 also rubbish.

    hope they improve it for you mate!

  • In the bottom right corner of Windows 10, there should be a power icon (you might need to click the up arrow icon).
    Click the power icon, and a power meter should pop up with 3 or 4 points on a line.
    Drag that meter all the way to the left it should say "more battery life" or something like that. You should get more battery life.

    At least that's how it worked on moms laptop.

    If you drag it all the way to the right it will allow high power to the processor which is useful for encoding videos or something but not necessary for web browsing, video watching, file editing, word processing etc.

    When set all the way to the right the laptop would only get 4 to 5 hours battery life with a new replacement battery installed, requiring the charger to be plugged in during the day. When all the way to the left it will get 8 to 10 hours total.

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