08/18/2022
Battery life
Microsoft says the Surface Laptop Go 2 can last up to 13.5 hours between charges, which is impressive considering it only has a 41.5Wh battery. It’s on the lower end of the capacity scale for 12-14-inch ultraportable laptops.
However, you can only get close to that kind of figure if you use the Battery Saver mode.
Using the standard Windows 11 mode you’ll see about 6.5 to 7 hours of use with very light use. We’re talking writing a document, maybe a wee bit of web browsing. This jumps up to around 11 hours in Battery Saver, which is a much greater gain than we usually see just from switching Power Saver on. Special sauce just for the Surface line? Who knows.
Use the Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 2 for ultra-light tasks with the brightness maxed, in Battery Saver mode, and it can last around 7 hours. Not too bad.
Let’s finish off with the speakers and we**am. The Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 2 has an unusual stereo speaker array that pipes sound up through the keyboard rather than out of side grilles.
It leads top quite narrow sound dispersal, but the tone is pretty good for a cheap laptop, with relatively smooth mids and only a bit of distortion with some content at high volume. However, max volume isn’t super high and there’s no real bass here, which you do get in some high-end laptops these days.
The Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 2’s we**am uses a basic 720p sensor. We’ve seen worse but the picture is low on detail, not even close to what you get in the more tablet-like Microsoft Surface Go 3 from its 5MP we**am.
