On average every 3-4 months my Surface will refuse to charge the battery. Once the battery is fully discharged it again charges fine for another 3-4 months or so.

Years ago it was rather common to need to fully discharge a battery to clear out the 'charge memory' but I thought that was done and gone long ago. Still I think this has to be by design with the Surface as it is too regular of a thing and, once discharged, it again charges fine.

The thing uses a lithium-ion battery. Looking the battery type up it is stated that they don't need a total discharge but I can't really see any other reason for this behavior. BTW, when I say the Surface needs to be totally discharged that is not totally correct. It will automatically shut down at between 6 and 10% remaining charge and then, once again charge fine. You never actually want to allow to allow a lithium-ion battery to reach 0% charge as this can actually damage the battery lowering the number of charge cycles.

Any ideas as to another possible reason for this behavior?

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Not sure, but my MSI laptop has a built-in program to discharge the battery and recharge it. It wants you to run it every three months or so, maybe yours is doing something similar without the program.

At least the timing seems to be about the same. Actually there may even be a program doing it as with your laptop. I got rid of some stuff when I got the thing but didn't in any way 'deep clean' as I mostly just use it as an eBook reader. There could well be an app that does this on my surface that runs in the background as a process or service automatically.

Actually partially off topic but still concerns batteries... I read an article a few months ago that surprised me a bit. Apparently browsing the net uses more battery than watching a movie. Don't know if the article was accurate but, if so, is a bit of a surprise to me.

<edit>
Actually I take back the thought that there may be an app on my Surface since I upgraded it to Windows 11 and then, later, wiped it and went back to Windows 10. If there is something similar to the app on your laptop it would have to be hardware based.

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