Surface Pro 3
I recently purchased a Surface Pro 3 and have to say – I absolutely love it. The marketing is spot on with this device, it truly is a laptop and tablet in one. I am particularly impress with the battery life. Last week, I did a few battery tests with very pleasing results. The first test was with brightness at 100%. I carried on a normal day of emails, Yammer posts, conference calls while writing notes, etc. At 100%, I was able to work 5 hours before I needed to find some power. The second test was with brightness at about 50%. You may think 50% is pretty dark, but I was happy with the brightness and able to see just fine (after a little while I had forgotten that I was working under reduce brightness). With the same type of ‘work’ activities on the device at 50%, I was able to work 7.5 hours before hitting the 5% critical mark. During this second test, I actually worked the entire day without plugging the device in. Awesome.
I won’t do a full review of the device since there are plenty of place you can read in depth evaluations…however, I will say that this really is a great work and personal device.
InstantGo
I wanted to share an interesting feature of Windows 8 that I found recently. Related to the great battery life above, Windows 8 added a feature called ‘Connected Standby’ which is now ‘InstantGo’ in Windows 8.1. You can read more about InstantGo here: http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/windowsexperience/archive/2014/06/19/instantgo-a-better-way-to-sleep.aspx
Sleep Study
PCs that have Windows 8.1 and compatible hardware, also have a cool new feature called ‘Sleep Study’. It’s a logging mechanism that monitors the battery drain during sleep. You can then analyze what hardware components are causing wake/sleep drain of the battery.
Enabling Sleep Study
Enabling Sleep Study is easy. Just fire up a command prompt with Administrative privileges
Once you have the command prompt open, type powercfg /sleepstudy
Your report will be created in a temporary location like C:\windows\system32\sleepstudy-report.html
Copy that file to the desktop (or different location other than C:\windows\system32 directory)
Open the file in Internet Explorer
