Dell Venue 8 Pro Battery drain and failure to wake from sleep

I have been experiencing the same issue!

Update your BIOS to A04. This is supposed to resolve the "device shuts off when woken up from standby at lower battery levels."

Nothing so far has resolved the excessive battery drain on standby, however.

I am experiencing both issues as well, the battery drain however is the most annoying. Funnily enough this did go away until i applied the A02 stylus update the other day and now its back.... really annoying. i actually do love this device but waking it up and finding you have lost a <ADMIN NOTE: Substitute character removed as per TOU> load of power is really annoying... Dell please do something you 'almost' have the perfect device here.

Update your BIOS to A04. This is supposed to resolve the "device shuts off when woken up from standby at lower battery levels." Nothing so far has resolved the excessive battery drain on standby, however.

From some basic profiling I did, it looks like maintenance jobs overnight are what are causing the excessive battery drain I'm seeing.  If they'd just stuck with Windows RT, we wouldn't be seeing these issues, but noooooo....

Well here's my update...I ended up returning the 32gb model I had.  I have to admit that I was a bit harsh on tech support as they did try, but ultimately could not solve the issue with that tablet.  They were polite and even called me to check on status.  I have since returned that tablet and purchased a 64gb V8P which so far (fingers crossed) has not had ANY of the issues we have been reporting.  This is what noticed between the two in terms of updates:

• My 64gb unit came with Bios A01 installed where as the 32gb unit came with A02 installed. 
• Going off of user feedback on a tablet review website I saw, I skipped the "connect to wifi" step and ensured the tablet was set to only notify me of updates and I would install manually.  Once I selected that option and finished setting up the tablet, I installed ALL of the dell driver updates then installed Windows update.  Note: DO NOT INSTALL these Windows updates: KB2883200 or KB2887595(if shown).

That's it...I've had my 64gb unit for two weeks with no sleep/wake issues or severe battery drain.  On average I lose about 6-8% overnight because of the scheduled maintenance.  Otherwise, I recharge my tablet on average every 1.5 days.  Now this is how a Windows tablet should work!  If I had one suggestion to make to dell, it would be to ask MS to remove the known bad updates that have been causing these issues (mentioned above).  Not that manually updating my tablet is an issue, but I should be able to allow my tablet to auto update as needed.

Amfranco, don't get excited yet.  I have a 64 gb that I bought right before Christmas.  Worked fine for little over a week, then nothing but issues.  Not only is the battery a hot mess, but my tablet rarely connects to my home Wi-Fi.  I have to continually disconnect and re-connect while sitting in my own home, while my husband sits joyfully watching movies on his Kindle.  I've had Tech Support on the phone on two occasions and did battery updates, etc, to no avail.  When running diagnostics, I have two errors:  battery not installed and APs not working ? (something to do with communication with Wi-Fi, which explains the no or limited internet problems.)  I am now returning my tablet to probably have motherboard replaced, which is not my definition of customer service at all.  This is obviously a defective tablet which will probably never work correctly.  I have been a Dell customer for 15 years, and this is the most frustrated I have been over a Dell product. 

In the past, I had an issue with a Dell PC we purchased, and less two weeks after purchasing it Dell told us to return it and they replaced it.  What happened to that level of customer service? 

For what it's worth I'm two for two.  I'm seeing the expected battery life (they don't drain in a couple of hours, but they will die after two days in standby - an annoying part of x86 architecture) and wifi works as expected.

So not everyone is seeing results as horrible as the other guy. That said, there is still a LOT of room for improvement.

That's a pretty sad comment on the quality of product.  The fact that you returned three before finally getting two that worked right tells me this is a *** shoot as to whether or not the tablets will even work.  I am more than a casual user of technology:  I use it everyday in my work and troubleshoot for most of the staff who work for me.  Using the tablet doesn't take a rocket scientist, but constantly having to diagnose issues with it while all the other tablets (androids and iOS) I've used have no issues is very frustrating.

Thanks for the encouraging words, but it doesn't change my mind about this tablet.  Dell just needs to fix (or better yet, replace) it and make sure nothing else goes wrong with a tablet less than 30 days old.

I now have two dv8p tablets that both work well. But that's after bricking and returnning three others to Costco. These tablets are fragile software wise and vulnerable to set up due to the WiFi, touch, driver, and Windows issues.  Some users will be lucky while others stymied.  too complex for casual users not accustomed to dealing with bleeding edge technology.  That's why I bought them at Costco on sale and with a generous 90 day no questions asked return policy.   I'm definitely keeping one of these beautiful but temper mental mini pc's.    

Maybe because I want it on in a tenth of a second, not ten seconds?  Not having instant on is a dealbreaker on x86 tablets and was my biggest concern.

I don't understand why you'd put it in sleep mode at all, let alone overnight.  It takes like 10 seconds to boot up from a shutdown.

:emotion-2:  You young whipper-snappers are amazing.  Why back in my day, when I started out as a computer programmer in the early 70's, it could sometimes take a week before I'd get a computer run back. :emotion-5:  LOL

The fact that I can't set the boot address via switches on the front panel is very hard to accept:emotion-2:

I will say that this should work correctly out of the box and SW should just work without any hassle.

FWIW, if your battery drains after 2 days in standby, your connected standby is drawing too much power. At 1%/hr drain, you should get 4 days of CS before it won't startup. IMO, a 24hr CS state should got to full shutdown since the device doesn't support true hibernation.

I have the similar issue. I'm unable to wake up the device If it is the sleep mode longer than ~10 sec. I have the latest drivers, BIOS and Windows Updates.

I did some tests and I found that after disabling WiFi adapter driver in the Device Manager wake up started to work well with no issues.

It looks like a WiFi hardware or a driver bug in the Connected Standby implementation.

Connected Standby is a new feature in Windows which helps to resume from sleep in less than 0.5 sec.

The performance of a resume from connected standby is almost always faster than a resume from the traditional Sleep state and significantly faster than a resume from Hibernate or Shutdown .

More about Connected Standby:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn481216(v=vs.85).aspx

Best Regards

I have the similar issue. I'm unable to wake up the device If it is the sleep mode longer than ~10 sec. I have the latest drivers, BIOS and Windows Updates.

I did some tests and I found that after disabling WiFi adapter driver in the Device Manager wake up started to work well with no issues.

It looks like a WiFi hardware or a driver bug in the Connected Standby implementation.

Connected Standby is a new feature in Windows which helps to resume from sleep in less than 0.5 sec.

The performance of a resume from connected standby is almost always faster than a resume from the traditional Sleep state and significantly faster than a resume from Hibernate or Shutdown .

More about Connected Standby:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn481216(v=vs.85).aspx

Best Regards

Dominik