Over this past weekend a renewed discussion has been happening on Twitter about the Microsoft Surface RT and whether or not it is having an issue warning users that the remaining battery level is at a critical level and that it will shut down.
By default the Microsoft Surface RT power scheme is set to provide users a low battery level warning when the device reaches 6% remaining battery and then a critical battery warning when 3% of the battery remains. It is at that point the default setting on Surface RT will shut down the tablet.
I experienced this possible bug over the weekend for the first time when the tablet just shut down in the middle of my news reading. No visual warning of a low battery/critical battery state was given at all.
This happened right around the Surface’s debut to one of my Twitter followers and we discussed it at the time, verified the default settings and tried to figure out why it happened but did not get any resolution.
When it occurred to me this past weekend I mentioned it on Twitter and several others chimed in reporting similar experiences. There were also a couple of folks who reported they have always seen the low and critical battery warnings on their devices.
To troubleshoot this I went into the advanced power options menu and changed a couple of settings and then changed them back to their defaults. Sometimes this can help register a change in settings across the system/registry. I am running a group looping YouTube videos right now as I prepare this post to see if I get the warnings or not.
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So here I am about an hour or so later in real time.
I just looped 5 HD YouTube videos constantly to run my Surface RT battery down from 26% to low (6%) and critical (3%) levels. This would allow me to test manually changing and then reverting back to defaults to see if it would trigger than appropriate battery level warnings.
I was very pleased to see this pop up when the Surface RT hit 6% left on the battery:
I quickly hit the Windows key and Print Screen buttons on my bluetooth keyboard to grab the screenshot and within about 2 minutes the system shut itself down without further warning. Upon reboot the battery level was showing at 3%.
So it would seem that changing and applying new levels to your battery low and critical options in the advanced power menu may reset things on the system and have the warning pop up if it was not present initially.
Based on how quickly the system moved from 6% to 3% remaining I may bump up the low and critical thresholds to 10% and 5% respectively to have a little more time to shut the system down in an orderly fashion or get it hooked up to main power.
I would love to hear from anyone out there that has experienced the lack of a battery level warning on their Surface RT and whether or not manually changing the levels brings that notice up on your systems.
