New Surface Pro 4, Surface Book updates give both a battery boost

Surface Book

Microsoft has once again issued a fresh set of updates for the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4, which bring identical benefits to these hybrids, the principal boon being improved battery longevity.

There are four driver updates in total: one for the Surface Management Engine, another for the Surface UEFI, one for Surface Integration, along with a driver update for Surface Integration Service Device.

The first two tweaked drivers are both designed to ensure better stability and enhance performance when switching between different power states on your Surface.

Balance of power

And the final update addresses the default power plan, which is 'Balanced', and ensures this stays correctly set whenever Windows is updated (given that this is a post-Anniversary Update set of fixes, we can only guess that said recent major OS update broke this power setting in some respect – it wouldn't be the only issue caused, that's for sure).

But the most interesting tweak is the third update for Surface Integration which Microsoft says "improves the device usability and battery life".

That (obviously) suggests overall battery life is going to be better, which is always very welcome. Back in June, the company also boosted battery life with a Surface Book update, although this was aimed at optimizing battery usage only when the device was in standby mode.

Some Surface Pro 3 users (a minority according to Microsoft) have had far more to complain about on the battery front, but at least the long-standing SP3 bug that resulted in the errant reporting of a lower battery capacity has finally been patched this week.

All in all, it's a good week for Surface batteries everywhere…

Via: Neowin

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).