Can a Failing Surface Pro 3 SIMPLO Battery Be Reconditioned Back to Normal?

If you’ve not been following along, Microsoft inserted a couple different manufacturer batteries into its Surface Pro 3 line of tablets. One of those, the one from SIMPLO, is reportedly having severe storage capacity issues after a year or so of use (for some it’s a much shorter time period than that).

Instead of me rehashing the whole scenario and for those new to this news, read the latest on the growing issue: Surface Pro 3 Battery-gate: Piecing it Together.

According to reports, Microsoft will fix the battery problem in affected devices, however, the cost to the customer is around $450 for tablets that are out of warranty. But, a fix might be much easier – and more cost effective – than that, according to juanmaq in the Microsoft answers forums.

Juanmaq – let’s’ call the person Juan – experienced the SIMPLO degradation but spent the better part of a month performing specific daily exercises to recondition the battery back to its normal capacity. The methods taken are long and drawn out, but if they work for everyone, could save customers a frustrating call to support and $450.

Here’s what Juan did:

First of all, I went back to the previous version of the driver of the battery and reboot, then update it again with the last driver of the battery and restart.

 Afterwards I started to always leave it disconnected from the electrical power supply after turning it off or Hibernate, for many hours, basically throughout the night and part of the day.

 Then, each day with patience used it only on battery up to 50% or 60% and then connecting it to charge it. While I was doing this I realized that is was taking more time for loading when arrived to the 99% and when it got to the 100%, the capacity of load was of 2 to 3% more than the charge capacity of the previous day, and I did it during a week, until now that it reached the 100% of the capacity again.

In the forum post, Juan also provides battery life reports as evidence of his success and that his recipe for reconditioning actually worked.