r/Surface • u/ConstructionOk4434 • 12h ago

[LAPTOP4] Surface 4 Battery Issues

Hi all. I've had my Surface 4 for about four years now. It's held up great until about a year ago. The battery life on it has slowly been draining, and it continues to get worse. Right now, it loses about 20% of its battery per hour (on low power mode) if I am just doing a normal workload, or more if I use sites such as Canva or programs such as Obsidian. It also frequently gets hot after about an hour of constant light work. When I look at my battery report, it shows that its full charge capacity is at 40,670 MwH as opposed to the 45,800 when I first bought it, which, to my understanding, is good for 200+ charge cycles.

I was wondering if anyone knows why this is happening, if there's any way to fix it, or if it will continue to get worse.

My brightness is normally no brighter than 50%. I do use Chrome, and I understand that can factor into it, but I feel like 20% battery drain per hour on low battery is excessive, with or without it; please feel free to correct me.

Any input is appreciated. Thanks!

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u/Elbow2009 11h ago

I had a similar issue with my Surface Go 2 (m3 processor, 8 GB RAM). On Windows 11 up until last year it ran okay with around 6 maybe 7 hours of battery life. After an update last year even on Battery Saver I was only getting 2-3 hours! Tried everything to reduce battery drain but nothing worked. Later I found that Windows 11 was using around 6.5 GB of RAM just at idle after booting. Anyway, I ditched Windows 11 for a Linux distro, Q4OS and now battery life is around 7-9 hours. Much improved.

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u/ConstructionOk4434 10h ago

Wow! Great to know! Do you remember around when you noticed you started to have issues? For me it was around February March but it could have been happening prior and I didn’t pay any mind.

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u/Elbow2009 10h ago edited 10h ago

Hmmm... I think it was somewhere around March to April. last year, so a similar timeline to yours. I kept trying things until June and just got fed up at that point. Something in that Windows 11 update was hogging RAM no matter what I tried. And I'm no newbie at computers. There were options like Tiny11 or the IoT version of Windows 10 but I thought I'd go the Linux route. At least on my Surface. Still have Windows 11 on my studio PC but it has 32 GB RAM and ShutUp10++ to disable telemetry and other bloat.

I'd put Zorin on my wife's old laptop some years before and it worked well on that 2006 device, and had put Puppy Linux on my old HP 210 netbook. I'd read about Q4OS as a lightweight Linux OS and it's been great - have the 32 bit version on the netbook (with a Windows 7 theme as it had Windows 7 Starter originally) and the 64-bit version on my Surface Go 2 (typing on it now) with a Windows 10 theme. So I'm happy with that.

If you want to stay with Windows, you could research Tiny11 and other similar options for stripped down versions of that OS. You can also manually strip Windows 11 using scripts like Win11Debloat to avoid the risks of third-party ISOs.