The Surface Pro 3 has had a series of issues around its battery life. There are two brands of battery used inside Microsoft's tablets: Simplo and LG. A bug meant that Simplo-equipped systems were seeing their battery life reduced to a handful of minutes, and this was fixed with a firmware update in August. But that fix appeared to be causing problems for systems with the LG batteries, rendering the devices unable to charge.

A new firmware update has been released (first spotted by Neowin) that purports to remedy this problem. Fingers crossed, it won't cause any further issues for Simplo systems.

Microsoft's release notes suggest that in both cases, the problems appear to be with the way the battery management reports the available battery life to the system. Batteries were being reported as full, even when they were empty. This prevented the system from being able to fully charge the batteries. With each successive charge, the "full" indication would be sent more and more prematurely, making the battery life fall further and further.

Just as with the Simplo fix, Microsoft says that it may take a couple of discharge and recharge cycles to fully restore the battery capacity to what it ought to be.